During the course of the audio there’s discussion in regards to Matt Mullenwag (co-founder of WordPress) siphoning away users of Thesis using the GPL issue as a lure. I’ve personally seen similar issues (GPL related, in fact) tear communities / userbases in half, spit them up and leave nothing behind. During the course of my younger years I was involved in a few MUDs or two that were in direct violation of the very license the software was developed on. In one particular case (Ahem, Medievia) there was such an undercurrent from the community that several derivatives spawned off, servers were exploited, users quit left & right and the project itself lost multiple developers and thousands of active users as a result of the backlash.

The GPL is an extremely well backed license whether it applies to Diku, WordPress or Linux itself & touts and extremely strong following. I believe that Chris Pearson is treading very thing ice when he states that WordPress needs to “back up their statements”, through force or otherwise. I do suspect Mullenwag’s own twitter remarks alone lead me to believe he’s generating an uprising of his own against Pearson and GPL-naysayers, something I see as somewhat belated but necessary to ensure future derivatives and themes stay in line with the license.

I do hope the situation gets prettier before ugly, and Pearson decides to switch his themes over to the license. The license itself wouldn’t inhibit or detract from any of his offerings, business or personal, but I suppose that’s for him to decide. Several other wordpress theme developers have swapped over to releasing their themes with the GPL intact and from what I garner through their public commentary, “Success” is all they’ve experienced since.

Any thoughts of your own?

There’s a number of exciting topics being discussed and it should be interesting as it’ll be my first time actually stopping in Las Vegas for anything more than gas. I just drove through this weekend on my way across the United States, a 2,400+ mile trip in my mean little Elantra.

If anyone is attending or in the area you should poke us. I’ll be staying in Vegas tonight and attending the first day of sessions. I’ll be hanging around in Los Angeles with Steven getting a few projects completed and enjoying the sunshine!

Before I’ve even had a few moments to dig into it after upgrading about sixteen installations of it manually, I’m taken aback by just how thorough of development Automattic has put into the interface and every aspect of the backend. I’ll have more shortly but if you haven’t yet, upgrade!

WordPress 2.7 Akismet statistics

If you have, what are your thoughts?

Matt Mullenwag at Wordcamp Toronto

Matt Mullenwag delivers his ‘State of the Word’ address in front of a crowd of developers, designers and regular old wordpress users at Wordcamp Toronto. The event was a success and I’m looking forward to tomorrow. The lunch Fused Network sponsored at the event (as well as tomorrow’s) was excellent. It was a great opportunity to meet some faces involved in design, development & open source — worth a visit

Photography by Rannie Turingan

“That is the beauty of free software, free meaning not only price but also the freedom to have complete control over it.”

The included features are more than sufficient to get anyone started with blogging on the web. Take a peek at the wordpress features page for more information. Now with all that in mind, let’s take a peek at some of the plugins, extensions and themes available to expand on the foundation that the open source project has laid.

WordPress Plugins

Plugins for wordpress allow you to extend the functionality by adding additional features that offer things like Flickr integration, RSS feeds and even more advanced systems like WordPress caching systems that turn your WordPress frontend into static content to allow your site to load faster and reduce load on your server.

A couple of the more popular WordPress plugins like Akismet, spam-blocking software for blogs, forums and more. We even use Akismet on our web hosting community because we’ve got enough Viagra and Cialis to last a lifetime. Gallery plugins, forums and all sorts of integration & extendability is available and of course best of all it’s all entirely free.

WordPress Themes

WordPress themes allow you as the end-user to change the entire look of your site from typography, css and graphics. With thousands of themes available for WordPress, it’s difficult not to find several that you like. There’s numerous sites dedicated to WordPress themes like Themeshaper run by one of our clients.

There’s many, many resources out there where wordpress themes could be had including the WordPress theme directory. I’d personally recommend perusing sites like Smashing Magazine for more options when it comes to WordPress.

In my next topic, I’ll delve into wordpress themes a bit more with some excerpts from a discussion regarding WordPress, the GPL and ‘premium’ or pay2play themes. These first few posts were simply introductions into WordPress and what it offers.

I myself have been using WordPress since early 2004 after abandoning the blog services Livejournal, Blogger and several other content management systems that simply didn’t make the cut. WordPress is extremely easy to use, has a user-friendly instalation system and upgrading and managing are even easy for my technically inept blog-wielding father whom has been managing several sites using it ranging in topics from the United Nations to Christian music concerts. The beauty of wordpress isn’t that it just makes blogging and contributing to the web easy — rather, that anyone can use it.

An example of that would be this video.

I say that it’s changing the face of the web because with millions of users, from fortune 500 companies to regular joes like myself use it to speak through the web: Anyone Everyone is able to contribute and use the web no matter their skill-level. It’s free speech. Hosting providers like ourselves offer easy to install systems to setup WordPress in just a few clicks which really lowers the entry barrier even further.

Now where it gets extremely exciting for someone like me is in the ease at which I can modify the design and frontend of WordPress to fit my needs. The blog we’re using right here on Fused Network for both our status blog and this one is WordPress, of course!

There’s hundreds of sites out on the web where you can download different themes to use in conjunction with WordPress like one of our very own clients’ sites, Themeshaper, Adii, Woothemes and many others.

If you haven’t yet, give wordpress a try using our Installatron system within your control panel. If you’re not a client, signup to Fused Network using the coupon fused25off to get a 25% discount so you can start using WordPress now.

There’s several pieces of community software that I have built sites on these days. Most of which I have actually used here on the web hosting community forums as well, albeit temporarily.

There’s a few that I’m going to be detailing today including phpBB, Vanilla, punBB and SMF (SimpleMachines). Each piece of software has it’s benefits and drawbacks, hopefully you’ll find this post remotely useful.

Starting with the one I’d consider the underdog…

PunBB
PunBB is a fast and lightweight PHP-powered discussion board. Its primary goals are to be faster, smaller and less graphically intensive as compared to other discussion boards. PunBB has fewer features than many other discussion boards, but is generally faster and outputs smaller, semantically correct XHTML-compliant pages.

Success.
And they succeed at their mission. PunBB is very lightweight right out of the starting gate & for a basic community. The PunBB site features a great set of addons, plugins and frequent software and security updates. One aspect that I especially liked was a feature on their site named ‘SpinkBB’ which allows you to easily create a custom color scheme with minimal effort.

The underlying drawbacks I found about PunBB though was that it was almost too minimal. Many basic features seemed to be lacking but if the forum wasn’t for my business site, I would have continued to use it for personal use. PunBB does a great job at what it intends to do: lightweight ass-kicking.

PunBB Official Site
Official PunBB Forums

The next forum up is one of my favorites despite my inability to use it, at all.

Vanilla
Vanilla is an open-source, standards-compliant, multi-lingual, fully extensible discussion forum for the web. Anyone who has web-space that meets the requirements can download and use Vanilla for free!

Vanilla is one of those forums that you simply want to use. It’s minimalistic, absolutely stunning and basic enough that anyone can wield it. There’s a massive range of extensions and an absolutely gorgeous site for fetching them. The man behind Vanilla is Canadian as well, maybe that’s why I have some odd inextinguishable desire to have Vanilla’s babies.

However that’s where the love stops. Actually, that’s right where the abuse started. Vanilla is great if you wish to continue using it in it’s vanilla form or with any of the ‘released’ themes. Customizability, though?

Vanilla drawbacks
Vanilla has a stunning plugin system, a diverse range of themes developed for it but it’s theming and template system is absolutely horrendous. I have used many, many forum systems prior and had no problems making minor tweaks, fiddling and all-in-all surviving in the code (despite having zero coding ability). Vanilla on the other hand, despite reading the documentation and spending a few days digging around on the official forum left me dazed and confused.

It may be far too advanced for me or things are just in general obfuscated. I couldn’t get even the smallest changes implemented without an outright desire to drive myself off the nearest cliff. Since I’m in Toronto the trek to the nearest cliff would be several hours. Nonetheless, I was willing and ready to make the trip.

Vanilla is one of those systems you want to love but know you’ll end up in ruins as an alcoholic after attempting to wield it for long. A ten in my book.. for the masochist.

Get Vanilla
Official Vanilla Forums

Onwards!

phpBB
Millions of people use phpBB on a daily basis, making it the most widely used opensource bulletin board system in the world. Whether you want to stay in touch with a small group of friends or are looking to set up a large multi-category board for a corporate website, phpBB has the features you need built in.

phpBB is hard to deny in the open source community. It’s one of those forums that have been around and is older than rocks, it’s frequently updated and there’s a gigantic plethora of addons, plugins and themes available for it solely due to it’s age. It’s great, usable and the latest version really does have a lot to offer as a forum.

One of my own problems I have with phpBB though is my security concerns. As a piece of software it’s been around for such a long time that with all of it’s past, I simply can’t trust it to build a community on. With the past phpBB team’s delays and insane amounts of exploits being released for it… ah. But it’s hard denying such beauty — the latest version of it had an insane amount of effort put into it and is one of the most usable pieces of forum software out there today.

Even if you don’t consider using it on a long-term basis I would recommend at least giving it a try.
phpBB Official Site
phpBB Community

SimpleMachines
SMF can trace its roots all the way back to a perl powered message board, YaBB. After awhile, there became a demand for a php coded version of YaBB. So that is where YaBBSE comes into play. While YaBBSE was getting bigger and bigger, there were certain aspects of it that just needed improvement and reworking. The decision was made that it was best to separate from YaBBSE because it was a lot different from YaBB and it was best to start from scratch. At this point, SMF started being developed. On September 29th, 2003, the first beta of SMF was released to charter members, SMF 1.0 Beta 1. While this was a huge milestone for SMF, only charter members had access to use it. But on March 10, 2004, SMF made its public debut with the first public SMF release available to everyone.

Last but certainly not least, SimpleMachines. SimpleMachines or SMF for short (Simple Machines Forum) is my favorite of all of the available software out there today. It’s a great mix of usability and features, all the while still offering easy customization and addons.

While I admit I do find it a bit bulky and the ‘default’ template leaves a lot to be desired, I love it. Best of all? The community behind the system. Recently I had the opportunity to spend about 48 hours on their forum while a few of their team members made great efforts helping me move data from one old version of another forum (IPB) to SMF.

The process was not easy by any means and as it was one of my first times really digging into simplemachines from a technical standpoint, quite frankly it went horribly. Nonetheless their team was behind me 100% and even offered to help dig in on their own and spend their own time getting it up and running: To me, that tells me they’re both confident with their software and care about the community enough to help get new folks using it.

Kudos SimpleMachines.
Official SimpleMachines Site
Official SimpleMachines Community

Building communities isn’t the easiest thing to do but with free, open source software out there like the ones detailed above it certainly takes a lot of weight off our shoulders.

Thank you for all of the great work developers!
Keep it up