Eric Barker, Cory Miller, and I were recently interviewed by 435 Digital, Tribune’s online marketing division, about why businesses should use WordPress. The consensus? Its free, its flexible, its SEO-friendly — all while being easy to use, update and customize.
Continue reading ‘Top Reasons to Use WordPress’
Tag Archive for 'GPL'
Last week I had the extreme pleasure of joining Ryan Price of Drupal Easy on a new podcast he launched called Our Yellow House. This podcast takes an unstructured, conversational tone and attempts to really capture “two people talking”. We wandered around a bit, but in this episode we touched on the recent GPL/thesiswp debate, Chat Roulette and Freelancing. Give it a listen and let me know what you think.
The GPL talk also spilled over into the Drupal Easy podcast, and tackles the issue from the Drupal community’s point of view (and also mentions my appearance on Our Yellow House). Checking that out is also worth your time.
It has never been a more exciting time to be a developer. Numerous open platforms exist in which to ply your trade and make a good living doing it. A platform’s user base grows as it matures, and inevitably gives birth to a thriving developer ecosystem supporting that platform, selling services into it, and when the platform is any good that ecosystem will turn into a marketplace. There has been an explosion of these ecosystems as evidenced by the success of the Apple App Store, Facebook, Twitter, Sales Force and Google Apps. In the last few years, WordPress has come into its own and has generated its own cottage industry for themes, plugins, and other add-on services.
What makes WordPress unique is that the platform itself is open sourced under the GNU General Public License v2. This license imposes itself on derivative works by insisting that they in turn be licensed under the GPLv2 if and when they are distributed to others. Generally, this poses no issues, and everyone releasing plugins and themes on the WordPress.org Extensions db has chosen to release their code under the GPL.
Continue reading ‘You got GPL in my peanut butter’
Jane Wells posted some new guidelines for WordCamp organizers and its raised quite a kerfuffle in the community.
Before I get into this, let me offer up a bit of background on my own involvement with conferences and events of all shapes. I’ve attended multiple WordCamps, both as a speaker and a participant. I’ve also helped organize BarCampOrlando, was involved with the first DrupalCamp Florida, and attended a number of other BarCamps and unconferences all over the country. I even booked and promoted concerts in a past life.
Let’s just say I’ve got a bit more Event Planning experience than your average bear, and have half a clue about what goes into making a good event great.
Here’s what I took away from the recent guidelines and along the way I’ll offer up a few assumptions of what I think are the motivations behind them, and what my interpretation of the guidelines are. This is by no means exhaustive nor is it intended to address anyone’s concerns directly.
Continue reading ‘I, for one, welcome our new WordCamp Overlords’
You gotta love the GPL.
All of the code I release is done so under the GPLv3 license, including my WordPress plugins. Because of this, my K2 Hook Up plugin inspired a very similar plugin for the premium theme, Thesis. This is why I love open source. I’m free to copy and paste and tinker and hack. So when I’m fortunate to offer up my own code for others to use, its a great feeling to have it in turn inspire another’s tinkering.
But its an even better feeling to receive a very nice complement on your contributions:
I’m very grateful for your plugin, Eric! Seems like whenever I try to do admin panel stuff, it’s so complex, leading to surrender on my part. Your plugin was very well written — elegant in its simplicity, as they say — and helped me learn some stuff! – Rick Beckman
Its interactions like this that really do make it all worthwhile.
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