andreasviklund.com

Rick Blalock of Beauty in Design will be porting a number of my designs into Joomla templates. The first port has already been released: andreas07 for Joomla. The demo looks really good, so it will be really interesting to see more Joomla versions. Thanks Rick!

In a sudden attack of inspiration, I built a new theme for WordPress last night. It is inspired by another of my own themes, 1024px, and the general layout is basically the same: 2 columns with the widget-enabled sidebar, a fixed width made for 1024px screen width (or higher) and a very simple but very functional structure.

Returning visitors may also remember the "Anvish" theme test some time ago. Anvish evolved into a customized and branded commercial theme for a client, so it was taken off the release plan. But this new theme has a similar layout, and even though most of the theme code is re-written from scratch I have used a few pieces of the original Anvish stylesheet. And I have spent some extra energy on making it accessible (WCAG AAA-rating) and SEO-friendly, and it seems to work pretty well.

Along with the WordPress theme, I will also release an XHTML/CSS template based on the same design in case someone wants to port it to some other content management system. Since this all happened so fast I have not had any chance of asking for ports before the template release like I did with andreas00. However, if anyone would want to port the design to any CMS and can do it quickly, send me an e-mail or post a comment and let me know which system you want to port it to. I will send copies of the template out to everyone who wants it, but only to one person per CMS to avoid duplicate ports. And I will of course add a link to your port inside the template so that it is easy for people to find.

More ported templates! The andreas00 template has been ported into a theme for Plone by Jon Stahl. As far as I know, it is the first theme for Plone that is based on one of my templates. A screenshot and a download link is available on the theme page.

And as if that wasn't enough, both andreas01 and andreas09 have been ported into Typo3 extentions by Dmitry Dulepov. Once again the first templates that are ported to that system. The extentions are labelled as beta versions, so it may be a work in progress. I am not familiar with Typo3 so I can't really tell, but Dmitry is one of the Typo3 core developers so it will be very interesting to see these ports live!

DreamTemplate, the website that I wrote about in my previous post, has now updated their template listing and provided the information that was missing. The open source templates are no longer being sold as "unique" templates, only offered for free download for members of the site (a membership costs $60/year though). The open source templates are identified by a message that reads:

"Open source template. Free to all members. These templates are not subject to DreamTemplate copyright terms and may be freely modified and distributed subject to Creative Commons License/OSI usage agreement."

This was the only thing DreamTemplate could do, and it is a shame that it had to take more than one month for them to react and make this change. It is also a shame that the story had to get so much attention. But I waited for them to reply to my e-mails for weeks without any success, so the stormy discussion was obviously needed.

But this update was still a very good move that I and many other designers truly appreciate. Thanks to MonkeyMan and everyone at OWD for your help, and also thanks to DreamTemplate for doing the right thing. I have nothing more to say about this, the problem is solved.

I just noticed that the design competition I mentioned in my last post is sponsored by a website that sells open source templates as "unique designs" for hundreds of U.S. dollars. In other words, someone can pay a lot of money for what he thinks is a "unique design" - but what he really gets is a slightly modified open source template which may already be used on thousands of websites. For example, andreas07 is sold as "unique" for $445, while andreas01 is sold for $325. If you don't want to pay for these "unique" templates, you can register for a $59.95 membership and download as many templates as you want to during one year.

While it is indeed perfectly OK (meaning "not nice, but also not illegal") to delete the credits and re-distribute templates on the commercial market, it is really ugly to fool people into paying hundreds of dollars to get something that they could just as well get for free. And calling the designs "unique" is nothing but a lie, and this completely crushes all respect I have for this website. They also don't answer my e-mails, so I assume that they don't mind that I write about their lack of business ethics.

But they are obviously sponsoring the open source community through OWD, so I've asked for more information in order to understand what this is all about. Once I know more I'll decide what to do next.

Until then, I recommend everyone who want "premium templates" to not click the banner on OWD. Download the free templates instead! If you still need "premium templates" (which I rather referr to as "commercial templates" since the price is the main difference), then check out the templates from 4Templates. Those are manually coded by professional designers, and sold by a serious company with good business ethics.

Edit: This is completely insane! Look at these rules, taken from the license information on the mentioned website:

• "You may not sell/giveaway our templates to 3rd parties."
• "You may not claim that you designed our templates."
• "You may not include/bundle our templates within your products and sell them."
• "You may not distribute our template after you have performed modifications on it, UNLESS all images and design objects are replaced and the template looks drastically different from the original template. The images we use are licensed and if you use them without obtaining a proper license you will be liable for damages and copyright infringement."

And on the same page, the following warning is posted:

"IMPORTANT WARNING - All our template(s) and digital work(s) have been filed with the US, UK and Australian Copyright Office. If you misuse or distribute our digital works without prior written consent from us, we will seek damages and you will be prosecuted."

This is just… Insane…

Edit 2: Leaving the topic for now to let other people do their thing. I've been forced to explain myself over and over again, since many have missed what the main problem really is. But a lot of people have learned the truth about these "unique" templates, and that is good. Now I just hope that the website owners go through their templates and make sure that they don't keep the false marketing and the direct lies on their site. That is the only reasonable thing to do if they want to show some kind of good spirit. But I won't waste any energy on this for now, I still have a lot of work to catch up with…