Comments on: Amazing How Themes Spread

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By: John Winslow

John Winslow — Mon, 02 Apr 2007 02:21:02 +0000

It isn’t so amazing how they spread out, as people (like me) change their minds about themes all the time. It is truly interesting to see how people edit and customize the themes so they aren’t EXACTLY the same.

I am using this BloggingPro Theme, though I have hacked it to bits and added specific code of my own and others to give me the best of all worlds.

I like an image in my header so I added one. I LOVE the blockquotes in Cutline so I added them.

A few code snippets here and there and although the theme is obviously BloggingPro, it is now JOHN’S BLOGGINGPRO.

I may mess with the colours yet….

By: flickrville

flickrville — Mon, 20 Nov 2006 04:02:16 +0000

Yea, many themes have been modified, i modified the one i’m using on my site now and am quite happy with it

By: milo

milo — Sun, 19 Nov 2006 06:39:50 +0000

Well, asking the original developer friendly for permission to release the modded theme should be usus.

By: SmallPotato

SmallPotato — Sat, 18 Nov 2006 20:09:55 +0000

As a free wordpress themes designer, I want to contribute to the community, but right now, there’s a certain point that I’m not going to tolerate. And that’s when other designers steal my design concepts, modify them, and redistribute them under their own name.

For example, my Neo-Sapien theme that BloggingPro featured earlier this year, Dandyland.org modified it and redistributed it on wordpress.net. If you read on that page, the description even says “Slik and dark theme originally built for dandyland.org.”

Legally, Dandyland isn’t wrong, but ethically, it isn’t right.

Once you strip away the comments in coding and the credit links, there’s no way that you can tell who designed or coded a particular theme. What really gets me is that some stealers have been featured on CSS galleries for good looking designs hahaha. I’m not jealous of that because I don’t bother submitting my work to CSS galleries, but it pisses me off to see my work being featured for their quality without my name on it. (For example, browse cssmania.com and you’ll run into the Neo-Sapien design again hahaha.)

(As for my own mistake on this Neo-Sapien theme, I used a movie cover for the banner without written permission. I’ve learned from that and also updated Neo-Sapien download file without the movie cover.)

For future themes, I’m going to ask bloggers to credit me or not use my themes at all. That’s the way it is until there’s another solution. It’s sad that some bad apples of the blogging community keep ruining it for everyone else.

On the bright side of theme designing, it’s crazy how much traffic and pagerank a single theme could generate. Prior to WPDesigner, I’ve never had a PR5 website (not that page rank really matters). If I wanted, I could use the free traffic to promote my own blog related products and services. I think that’s one area that theme designers could really expand on to get some money to pay for their web hosting hahaha.

Anyway, that’s my 2 cents.

By: David

David — Sat, 18 Nov 2006 00:45:56 +0000

I have noticed more than once where someone has realized that someone is calling a theme their own, when all they have done is tweaked the css and images a bit and sent it out into the world. This recently happened with the Cutline theme.

By: Robert

Robert — Sat, 18 Nov 2006 00:31:57 +0000

Stupid question perhaps - how can you track a theme? “Proprietary” CSS classes/IDs maybe?

By: brem

brem — Fri, 17 Nov 2006 23:58:19 +0000

It would be inpractical, php being what it is.