WPCom From Dev

Twittering from the Tractor

Fri, 03 Jul 2009 12:59 GMT

Steve Tucker is a wheat farmer in Nebraska changing the way we interact with the folks who grow our food. Twittering from the tractor: smartphones sprout on the farm is an interesting article at CNN.com about how farmer's like Steve are using Twitter and other tools to bridge the urban-rural divide and get us thinking more about where our food comes from.

The idea of extending the Twitter network into interesting locations around the world via mobile devices is at the core of our thinking and Steve sums it up well when he says, "I can be in the most remote place and just with the power of having a BlackBerry ... I can communicate with anybody at anytime about anything." You can follow @Tykerman1 on Twitter.

p.s. Twitter co-founder and CEO @ev grew up on a farm in Nebraska.

Themes are GPL, too

Wed, 01 Jul 2009 23:50 GMT

If WordPress were a country, our Bill of Rights would be the GPL because it protects our core freedoms. We've always done our best to keep WordPress.org clean and only promote things that are completely compatible and legal with WordPress' license. There have been some questions in the community about whether the GPL applies to themes like we've always assumed. To help clarify this point, I reached out to the Software Freedom Law Center, the world's preëminent experts on the GPL, which spent time with WordPress' code, community, and provided us with an official legal opinion. One sentence summary: PHP in WordPress themes must be GPL, artwork and CSS may be but are not required.

Matt,

You asked the Software Freedom Law Center to clarify the status of themes as derivative works of WordPress, a content management software package written in PHP and licensed under version 2 of the GNU General Public License.

We examined release candidate 1 of WordPress 2.8, which you provided to us at http://wordpress.org/wordpress-2.8-RC1.tar.gz. The “classic” and “default” themes included in that release candidate comprise various PHP and CSS files along with an optional directory of images. The PHP files contain a mix of HTML markup and PHP calls to
WordPress functions. There is some programmatic logic in the PHP code, including loops and conditionals.

When WordPress is started, it executes various routines that prepare information for use by themes. In normal use, control is then transferred via PHP's include() function to HTML and PHP templates found in theme package files. The PHP code in those template files relies on the earlier-prepared information to fill the templates for serving to the client.

On the basis of that version of WordPress, and considering those themes as if they had been added to WordPress by a third party, it is our opinion that the themes presented, and any that are substantially similar, contain elements that are derivative works of the WordPress software as well as elements that are potentially separate works. Specifically, the CSS files and material contained in the images directory of the “default” theme are works separate from the WordPress code. On the other hand, the PHP and HTML code that is intermingled with and operated on by PHP the code derives from the WordPress code.

In the WordPress themes, CSS files and images exist purely as data to be served by a web server. WordPress itself ignores these files[1]. The CSS and image files are simply read by the server as data and delivered verbatim to the user, avoiding the WordPress instance altogether. The CSS and images could easily be used with a range of HTML documents and read and displayed by a variety of software having no relation to WordPress. As such, these files are separate works from the WordPress code itself.

The PHP elements, taken together, are clearly derivative of WordPress code. The template is loaded via the include() function. Its contents are combined with the WordPress code in memory to be processed by PHP along with (and completely indistinguishable from) the rest of WordPress. The PHP code consists largely of calls to WordPress functions and sparse, minimal logic to control which WordPress functions are accessed and how many times they will be called. They are derivative of WordPress because every part of them is determined by the content of the WordPress functions they call. As works of authorship, they are designed only to be combined with WordPress into a larger work.

HTML elements are intermingled with PHP in the two themes presented. These snippets of HTML interspersed with PHP throughout the theme PHP files together form a work whose form is highly dependent on the PHP and thus derivative of it.

In conclusion, the WordPress themes supplied contain elements that are derivative of WordPress's copyrighted code. These themes, being collections of distinct works (images, CSS files, PHP files), need not be GPL-licensed as a whole. Rather, the PHP files are subject to the requirements of the GPL while the images and CSS are not. Third-party developers of such themes may apply restrictive copyrights to these elements if they wish.

Finally, we note that it might be possible to design a valid WordPress theme that avoids the factors that subject it to WordPress's copyright, but such a theme would have to forgo almost all the WordPress functionality that makes the software useful.

Sincerely,
James Vasile
Software Freedom Law Center

[1] There is one exception. WordPress does reads CSS and image files to create previews of templates for the template selection portion of the administrative interface. Even in that case, though, nothing in those files calls any WordPress functions, is treated as a command by PHP, or alters any other WordPress data structure. These files are read as data and used to create an image and display a miniaturized version of a webpage to the user.

Even though graphics and CSS aren't required to be GPL legally, the lack thereof is pretty limiting. Can you imagine WordPress without any CSS or javascript? So as before, we will only promote and host things on WordPress.org that are 100% GPL or compatible. To celebrate a few folks creating 100% GPL themes and providing support and other services around them, we have a new page listing GPL commercially supported themes.

May The Tweets Be With You

Wed, 01 Jul 2009 11:37 GMT

The ecosystem growing around Twitter is something we very much believe in nourishing and supporting. There are lots of really awesome services and applications out there like TweetDeck, TweetMeme, Tweetie, BackTweets, Tweetboard, and others that we absolutely love as do many users. However, as the ecosystem grows there is also the possibility that confusing and potentially damaging projects could emerge.

We have applied to trademark Tweet because it is clearly attached to Twitter from a brand perspective but we have no intention of "going after" the wonderful applications and services that use the word in their name when associated with Twitter. In fact, we encourage the use of the word Tweet. However, if we come across a confusing or damaging project, the recourse to act responsibly to protect both users and our brand is important.

Regarding the use of the word Twitter in projects, we are a bit more wary although there are some exceptions here as well. After all, Twitter is the name of our service and our company so the potential for confusion is much higher. When folks ask us about naming their application with "Twitter" we generally respond by suggesting more original branding for their project. This avoids potential confusion down the line.

Thanks to Robin Wauters at TechCrunch for raising the issue because it highlights a need. As we build our platform team, we will be adding more documentation, guidelines, and best practices to help developers get the most out of our growing set of open APIs. We'll work together to ensure success for Twitter, developers, and everyone who uses these services while avoiding confusion and maintaining quality.

Following and Followers Page Improvements

Tue, 30 Jun 2009 17:16 GMT

When you click on the Following and Followers links from your Twitter home page, you'll notice that we've upgraded the design of these pages and added features. Instead of a basic list, there are now actions you can perform that provide a better overall experience. For example, you can turn on SMS, unfollow, mention, block, direct message, and more. Tip: You can also view the accounts that someone else is following and follow them yourself.

Digg: Dupe Detection Updates Are Here

Tue, 30 Jun 2009 14:15 GMT

Hi all,

After much anticipation, we are finally releasing several major updates to our dupe detection technology and content submission process that should go a long way in eliminating duplicate submissions.

To better understand the nature of the problem, we analyzed the types of duplicate stories being submitted. Most common are the same stories from the same site, but with different URLs. Our R&D team came up with a solution that identifies these types of duplicates by using a document similarity algorithm. Look for a separate tech blog post on how this works, but it has proven to be a reliable way of identifying identical content from the same source.

Another common type of duplicate is the same (or similar) story covered on different sites. Because this enters more subjective territory, we focused on doing a better job at detecting dupes with similar descriptive information. By leveraging Digg's improved search technology, released a couple months back, we now match stories with similar titles and descriptions with much higher accuracy than before.

Most importantly, we made changes to an often cumbersome submission process. We moved the duplicate check immediately after the URL entry, *before* we ask for descriptive information. This eliminates the need to describe your submission before checking for dupes. In addition, the lag time from when a story is submitted to when it's available in our duplicate checker is now a few seconds. These changes may take some time to adjust to but we anticipate that they'll help to eliminate dupes and encourage folks to Digg previously submitted content.

While we pilot the new dupe detection system, we will continue to only block submissions of the exact same URLs within a 30-day period. We'll also be monitoring when certain Diggers choose to bypass high-confidence duplicates and will use this data to continue to improve the process going forward. As always, please share any feedback you have on these updates.

Cheers,
Chris

Restaurants on Twitter

Mon, 29 Jun 2009 08:08 GMT

Boston Globe Staff Photo by Yoon S. Byun

This article from my hometown newspaper is a great example of something we're increasingly inspired by at Twitter. Small businesses—in this case restaurants—using Twitter as a low cost way to connect with patrons and ultimately improve profits.

What can you do with 140 characters or less, the length of each tweet? A lot, restaurants are discovering - everything from posting daily specials to luring followers with offers of free appetizers to offering a glimpse of kitchen life. It’s all good for business.

This quote is awesome, "You don’t need technology to be spreading your message on Twitter." Well, you do need a bit of technology but not that much, it's true. With a chalkboard and a mobile phone you can boost business. Is your favorite restaurant on Twitter?

WordPress 2.8.1 Beta 2

Fri, 26 Jun 2009 14:06 GMT

2.8.1 Beta 2 is ready for testing. Download it, check out the changes since beta 1, and review all tickets fixed in 2.8.1. We especially suggest, recommend, and beg that plugin developers test their plugins against beta 2 and let us know of any issues. Notable fixes in beta 2:

Translation of role names fixed
wp_page_menu() defaults to sorting by the user specified menu order rather than the page title
Upload error messages are now correctly reported
Autosave error experienced by some IE users is fixed
Styling glitch in the plugin editor fixed
SSH2 filesystem requirements updated
Switched back to curl as the default transport
Updated the translation library to avoid a problem with mbstring.func_overload

Thanks again for testing WordPress.

WordPress 2.8.1 Beta 1

Sat, 20 Jun 2009 18:05 GMT

We've started work on the first maintenance release to 2.8. 2.8.1 will fix a handful of bugs that turned up in 2.8. Today we're releasing the first beta of 2.8.1. Download it, and check out the bugs fixed so far. Here are some of the notable issues that are fixed in beta 1.

Certain themes were calling get_categories() in such a way that it would fail in 2.8. 2.8.1 works around this so these themes won't have to change.
Dashboard memory usage is reduced. Some people were running out of memory when loading the dashboard, resulting in an incomplete page.
The automatic upgrade no longer accidentally deletes files when cleaning up from a failed upgrade.
A problem where the rich text editor wasn't being loaded due to compression issues has been worked around.
Extra security has been put in place to better protect you from plugins that do not do explicit permission checks.

If you would like to automatically upgrade from 2.8 to 2.8.1 Beta 1, follow these instructions. Thanks for testing WordPress.

President Obama wants to hear from you on health care

Fri, 19 Jun 2009 10:07 GMT

Hey everyone -

Last fall, we took your questions to the Presidential Candidates, and we're excited to announce that we're doing it again, this time in an exclusive interview with President Obama. We're partnering with ABC News for a special edition of Primetime entitled “Prescription for America”, where Diane Sawyer and Charles Gibson will be sitting down with the President to discuss his views on health care reform.

Since this is a topic that many of you are interested in, we're asking you, the Digg community, to submit your questions on the future of America's health care system. Some of them will be chosen for the live interview.

Submit your question in the comments section here. Digg up the questions you like and bury the ones that just don't cut it.

Ask and vote on questions for President Obama…

Then tune into ABC for this special live edition of ‘Primetime' on Wednesday, June 24th at 10pm ET/ 7pm PT to see if your question was asked.

Thanks, Mike

Digg Dialogg with Bruno

Thu, 18 Jun 2009 11:01 GMT

Hey everyone,

This upcoming Digg Dialogg is sure to be one of the more entertaining and unpredictable ones we've ever done. We'll be interviewing Sacha Baron Cohen in character as Austrian model Bruno next week. We’ll post the interview on the Digg Dialogg page Tuesday, June 30th at 10:00am PDT.

Bruno is the über-famous Austrian model and host of fashion & celebrity show Funkyzeit. He's releasing his full-length film, Bruno, worldwide on July 10th. Known for his fearless interviewing skills and impeccable fashion sense, he recently made a pretty dramatic entrance at the MTV Music Awards.

For those of you unfamiliar with Digg Dialogg, it gives you the opportunity to submit and vote up questions that will be posed to influential leaders, change agents, luminaries, and in this case an awesome entertainer and comedian. Check out previous Digg Dialogg episodes with Nancy Pelosi, Trent Reznor, Al Gore, John Boehner, Richard Branson and Arnold Schwarzenegger.

Submit and vote on your favorite questions on the Digg Dialogg page by Wednesday, June 24th at 12noon PDT. And as always, let us know what guests you’d like to see in the future.

Special thanks to our major distribution partner, Yahoo! Movies, as well as Metacafe and MiniNova.

Thanks,
Kevin