Red Balloons - a focus on Wordpress and MyBB

Is someone stealing your hard work? Read this before you get angry.

flick — Mon, 16 Jul 2007 21:58:39 +0000

As a spanking new observer to the WordPress community, it’s sometimes difficult to know where to stand when issues crop up. For instance, the hot topic of the moment is about the ethics of Sponsored Themes. The general mood is that they are a no-no, and recently, both the official WP Themes Directory and Weblog Tools Collection took the decision to remove Sponsored Themes from the database.

There has been a mini uproar from the sponsored themes group, with reference to Mark Ghosh‘s Turning the other Cheek, and Matt Mullenweg, the founding developer of WordPress, has made another post in response to this question sent into him from a user:

The only thing why (at least) I encode the footer is to prevent people from removing my designer link. I usually spend around 6 hours designing the graphics and coding the theme and some people simply take my link off and some of them even dare to write that the theme was designed and coded by them! How would you feel if someone took your WordPress script (since it’s free) and said they made it? Wouldn’t you like to bite their head off?

This is a great question in my humble opinion, since it is an issue that people are likely to come across even in real life. I have also come across this at some point in my brief online ‘career’, and it’s difficult *not* to be angry. However, Matt Mullenweg‘s reply is something that will continue to stay with me in the future as a guide, and in brief:

If you accept that bad people are going to be bad then the real question becomes how do you maximize the effect of the good instead of treating them just like the bad. (No one likes to be treated like a criminal.)

In my brief experience here’s three things that work:

Give people the tools they need to succeed. This can be interpreted on a lot of levels, but personally I’ve found at the most base the freedoms provided by the GPL and other open source licenses are incredibly empowering.

Celebrate the successes. Talk, connect, promote, and embrace the people who are creating things on top of your creation. (The best revenge against someone doing something bad is helping create something awesome.)

Provide a way for people to choose to help you, and try to remove as much friction from that process as possible. Now that you’ve ignored the bad people and delighted the good, by their very nature they’ll want to give something back.

Wise words indeed and what a way of changing one’s outlook! In the future I will endeavour to follow these guidelines – it will save alot of headache, stress and will keep one busy searching for new solutions. I would really recommend that everyone read the response in full, entitled ‘Price of Freedom‘, as it’s not often that one can find true gems in the online world!

Introducing NextGEN Gallery

flick — Mon, 16 Jul 2007 10:48:23 +0000

NextGEN Gallery is a gallery plugin by Alex Rabe, and is undeniably one of the most popular in the WordPress user sphere at the moment. This is due primarily to its robust features, the active support provided by Alex and also because it is currently under active development, so feature requests are welcome.

I have been following its progress since one of the earlier alpha releases (it is currently at 0.63) and leaps and bounds have been made from the original. Alex based the functionality of the plugin on an existing solution called MyGallery and then proceeded to mix in various other tools such as JQuery, Thickbox to create this plugin.

The most important points, I’m sure, for most users evaluating a new plugin are to

See it in action
Test the admin interface
Evaluate its usability for their application in terms of features and system requirements
Ease of customisation

If you’re like me, you’ll want to be able to plug-and-go almost 90% of the time. This means that display and also the admin interface are particularly crucial. For NextGEN Gallery, Alex has provided a few ‘case study’ links on the information page, as well as screenshots of the admin interface, and live demos of individual gallery pages. If you happen to be looking for more live sites, there is also the thread for people to post their in-action galleries.

Features wise, as mentioned before, NextGEN Gallery already has some fabulous functions (based on MyGallery) such as

Uploading images via zip file
Unlimited albums
Slideshow
Multiple display effects – CSS files and also Javascript based Thickbox, Lightbox, Grey box
Watermarking

Of those listed, I have really only evaluated Watermarking fully. The aim though, is to thoroughly test run NextGEN Gallery from installation, configuration, usage and further customisation, so in the next post, I’ll be writing in more detail about Installing NextGEN Gallery.

First Post!

flick — Sun, 15 Jul 2007 17:41:12 +0000

The historical first post, something that every site starts with when it comes to WordPress. I finally took the plunge and created a blog on WordPress.com, so that I could write freely about WordPress and MyBB, from the perspective of a web-user who knows something about building websites, and relies primarily on the good will of programmers when it comes to custom functions.

It probably won’t be updated very often during the holidays, but when it comes to exam time or deadlines, somehow one gets very attracted to working on everything else, including this blog.

The aim: to use this blog for further self-development when it comes to coding, as well as tutorials and useful tips for users of both WordPress and MyBB.