Note: This post is from many years ago . The content was edited in March of 2025 to remove dead links, improve clarity, or fix formatting, but no other edits were made. Enjoy this time capsule into the past.

As someone with an associates in Graphic Design and who enjoys good design I am always cautious when something claims to take the work out of design.  So when I saw Logo Design Studio* the it made me laugh and scream. The product’s tag-line is “Easy Logo Design and Illustration.”  Let’s be honest there is nothing “easy” about branding. Good design is hard, takes work, and requires a lot of thought.

It is products like these that worry me, not because I’m scare of losing my job, but because I’m tired of seeing crappy design. There seems to be this misconception out there that if you own Photoshop you’re a designer or if you have a nice camera you’re a photographer. This simply is not the case. I’m not trying to claim to be an expert and to be honest on occasion I’ve seen  great design come from people with no formal design background. What I am saying is that it’s not a matter of software that makes a good designer.

This brings me to a last and somewhat unrelated note, good design cost money. Yet another of my frustration in the design world is that people think that just because they can buy software for say $40 that they should then be able to get a logo for that amount. I’m sorry (okay no I’m not) but this is not the case. Good design will, and should, cost a fair amount of money. Again, it’s not about the money per say, it is however about getting what you pay for. If you think about it a good logo is something you will be using for the life of your business. What that looks like is totally up to you. And trust me it’s easier to do it right from the beginning than to have to go back and start over.

I’ll leave you with this:  yes branding cost money. Yes that can suck. Yes there is software that says it can do it for you. No, it probably can’t. Yes, you get what you pay for. Yes these are my opinions.

*I have to admit, I’ve never used this product, maybe it’s great (but probably not).

Note: This post is from many years ago . The content was edited in March of 2025 to remove dead links, improve clarity, or fix formatting, but no other edits were made. Enjoy this time capsule into the past.

For all you WordPress lovers on Twitter I’m sure you’ve notice the hash tag #thesiswp going around. What’s the big deal? Well yesterday Matt Mullenweg and Chris Pearson got into a little debate on Andrew show Mixergy on wither or not the Thesis WordPress Theme Framework should be GPL because WordPress is. The full debate can be seen here. It boils down to this, Matt says yes, Chris says No.

So who’s right? There have been lots of posts about if themes for GPL software are derivative works of WordPress therefore must fall under the same license. The general consensus (from Matt and others) is that because they pull in php code from their host platform that php code IS a derivative work therefore must be under GPL. This does not apply to CSS, Javascript, or Images (unless the author states so.)

The other side of the fence (Chris) is people who say that because the author wrote their own code they get to choose what license to use. This would be a valid argument if the author truly did write their own code, meaning they aren’t depending on function calls or any code from the parent platform.

This isn’t true for Thesis, however as Drew Blas has pointed out at his blog there is code copied directly from WordPress core used inside of Thesis. How did it get there? Well Rick Beckman, a former Thesis developer,  put it there as he explains on Matt’s blog post about the whole issue. Now with that information being true that clearly makes Thesis a derivative work and therefore must be licensed under the GPL.

To me I feel it really comes down to attitude. Chris put on a bad egotistical attitude about the issue at one point stating “I’ve been arguably one of the top three most important figures in the history WordPress.” He even went as far to say: “There’s no resolving this. Either you sue me or you don’t. Or you continue to talk, or you don’t.” To me the easy solution would be for chris just to humble himself bite the bullet and license his framework as Matt ask. There has been no proof that adding a GPL to your theme is hurtful in fact many developers claim and increase in sales since going GPL. Sure you could equally argue that Matt could humble himself and drop it but I feel that it comes down to respect.  Matt and WordPress are the platform that has allowed Chris to develop such a platform that he’s able to profit from it.  Now they are asking Chris to repect them and follow their license and he refuses. I feel that he has four options, make Thesis GPL, stop developing Thesis, do a complete rewirte of the code without any WordPress code, or write Thesis for another none GPL platform.

As for me and what I’ve learned. I learned that I will never buy/create/download a WordPress theme or plugin that is not GPL I feel that my freedom (as is speech) is more important than my right to license my work under my own license as least as far as WordPress is concerned. I also learned that #thesiswp answers its cell phone in the movie theater.

Note: This post is from many years ago . The content was edited in March of 2025 to remove dead links, improve clarity, or fix formatting, but no other edits were made. Enjoy this time capsule into the past.

UPDATE 3/18: This issue has now been resolved. You may go back to using this plugin as normal. Thanks Facebook.

As some of you may know I contribute to the development of Facebook CommentsTNG. This is a WordPress plugin that pulls comments from a Facebook note back into your self-hosted WordPress blog. This is extremely handy if you have your blog automatically pulled into your Facebook account as notes and want the comments left on those notes to be displayed on your public website.

This is all fine and dandy unless Facebook goes and breaks their mobile site, which is how the plugin gets the comments thus preventing the comments from being pulled in. At first I thought “oh they are Facebook they have good developers and I’m sure they are working on it.” Well, it’s been over a week now and it’s still broken. I’ve submitted a few bug reports myself and I know I’m not the only one. The main developer, Phil over at Philtopia also wrote a post explaining the problem and encouraging you to write a bug report.  And I am doing the same.

The problem is that the comments show up blank and display the date “December 31st 1969” which I believe is the default date if a date field isn’t being pulled properly. It looks something like this