WordPress & Genesis Theme Development
The Web Princess is writing this in the middle of the night and is exhausted... but even with that, you should know that she's good at this stuff, and what she doesn't know she finds out from other WordPress legends...
I have a number of small sites that I host for clients and friends, and for the last couple of years I’ve been hosting them on a WordPress multisite, just to keep things like updating simpler. And for a long time it worked really well.
However, as clients got bigger, and their requirements got greater, well, running things on multisite started to get a little, well, sketchy and I’ve come to the conclusion that while you CAN run things like this, maybe there are times when you shouldn’t.
There has been a whole lot of talk in the WordPress Community in recent months about WordPress theme and plugin licensing and I bet your pretty pink boots if you’re making themes or sites for clients, it’s something you’ve barely given a thought about. Because most of the issues in the news have centered around distribution and don’t affect client work.
However, if you’re making things to distribute, you should think about it… because if you want to make some money out of your theme or your plugin and/or if you want a lot of people to know about your theme or plugin you have some decisions to make about just how you allow that software to be distributed or reused.
WordPress itself and the core of the whole story, is licensed under GPL (GNU Public License1). In short, this means that if you’re using WordPress you have the following four freedoms
the freedom to use the software for any purpose,
the freedom to change the software to suit your needs,
the freedom to share the software with your friends and neighbors, and
the freedom to share the changes you make.2
This is the essence of free software (free as in speech (libre) not to be confused with free as in beer, (gratis)3).
Following on from my last post giving away the free social media menu I was approached by Peter Wilson with an offer of alternate code that reduces the volume of CSS required to pull off exactly the same results. Improving code with CSS specificity is something Pete and I have talked about before, and to [...]
There are a few blogs I follow pretty closely, and one of them predictably is Brian Gardner’s (predictably because he’s behind Genesis and I’m a bit of a fan). A while back Brian put together a tutorial about making a social media icon menu – I took it on board, I like rolling my own [...]
