Website Themes? - Page 3

Hey guys. I had no proper budget to get my website going (which is currently in more of a blogging format) www.pollymixtures.com

 

I found http://wpthemetweaks.com/ 

 

It has really concise instructions (free!) to input your own CSS coding to make the page have a lovely professional finish. Annie also could not have been more helpful when I came up against problems (I had no experience in wordpress or coding!)

 

Goodluck, whatever you choose to do :)

Checkout http://www.woothemes.com/

 

They have a wide variety of great looking themes for Word Press. They are tailored for different businesses, from ecommerce, to photographers, restaurants, writers, food, and more.

 

I would recommend paying for the themes, but due to the Word Press open source license, you can actually find a theme, Google for it, and download it for free. It's totally legal and you are not stealing from them. They have chosen to do business in an environment where their product has to be released for free. That said, there is nothing to stop a hacker from putting malicious code into the free version that you download, so you (and your web visitors) are safer if you purchase it from from Woo.

@maritzausa - Woothemes is great and a great resource for Premium themes / plugins...  Wordpress is open source and free but that doesn't mean all the plugins are free and open source.  I wouldn't ever use a premium plugin that I downloaded off a rogue site so that I could get it free.  You're open for law suites for stealing copyrighted software (the plugin), open to backdoors from the person that made available the plugin for free, and since the plugin will be used (usually) on a world wide accessible site then it's pretty easy to spot to exploit, sue, or whatever else which usually has bad consequences.  Plus it's basically stealing and most plugins aren't very expensive.... Another thing I just noticed is that even Automattic (the parent company of Wordpress) even sells a premium plugin called Vaultpress. 

This is not factually correct. I have purchased many WooThemes WordPress templates. They are indeed free to redistribute. In fact, I just opened up the folder for WooTube, one of their popular themes which I purchased. It, like WordPress, and by legal necessity, carries the GNU license. See for your self at their website (http://www.woothemes.com/terms-conditions/) Let me quote from Section 1 of that license:

 

 

If a WP plugin is distributed under the GNU license then it is free, but if it has a different license you may or may not have to pay for it. So you can't assume that all WP plugins are free, there are commercial WP plugins that you have to buy in order to legally use.

 

WordPress disagrees. See the statement below from their site:

(http://wordpress.org/about/license/)

 

 

The license under which the WordPress software is released is the GPLv2 (or later) from the Free Software Foundation. A copy of the license is included with every copy of WordPress, but you can also read the text of the license here.

Part of this license outlines requirements for derivative works, such as plugins or themes. Derivatives of WordPress code inherit the GPL license. Drupal, which has the same GPL license as WordPress, has an excellent page on licensing as it applies to themes and modules (their word for plugins).

There is some legal grey area regarding what is considered a derivative work, but we feel strongly that plugins and themes are derivative work and thus inherit the GPL license. If you disagree, you might want to consider a non-GPL platform such as Serendipity (BSD license) or Habari (Apache license) instead.

It looks like you are correct that all plugins must be GPL. However, the authors of software released under GPL can still charge license fees to use the software, even though the source code is publicly available.

For example, here is a list of popular Wordpress plugins that require payment in order to legally use.
http://www.sitepoint.com/top-10-premium-wordpress-plugins-for-2012/

In the context of GPL, "free" means free as in speech, not free as in beer.

That's a tough, grey area.  I've talked to a couple friends recently about this and they've heard of this debate over and over.  There's no clear answer it seems but to me it's just smarter to use an official plugin rather than a hacked, or potentially modified version.