andreasviklund.com

WordPress themes have become a major discussion topic recently, where the main threads have been sponsored links (and sponsored themes), credit link requirements, licensing options and usage rights. I have been tempted to write several long posts about this, but as you may have seen I haven't got much work done in the last couple of weeks. I'm back in good health again now, and will return to work next week. But for now I only want to make a few things clear about my own WordPress themes.

Free to modify, no limitations or obligations!

I have not defined any license for my themes since they are completely free in all senses. If I would have to put a license, the themes would go under the GPL. But I have never seen any need for that.

Just as with my free website templates, my WordPress themes are completely free to use without any kind of limitation or obligation. I kindly ask you to keep the footer credits, since it is a good way of giving something back to me for the work i have done. But it is completely voluntary, you are free to make any changes you may want to including removing the credits - or replacing it with your own.

No sponsorship slot sales

I get 20-30 offers for theme sponsorships every week. It is usually advertising companies or SEO agencies that want to place sponsored links in my themes, in exchange for a good amount of money. But I keep on turning these offers down, every single one of them, since WordPress founder and developer Matt Mullenweg has asked me to. I am not providing any advertising space in my themes, and I don't have any "sponsored link slot" that I sell to the highest bidder.

However, I do have regular credits placed in the footer.php of each theme. While I kindly ask theme users to keep the design credits, it is no demand or obligation. As said, theme users are free to edit and modify the themes in any way they may want to. That is why I don't get too mad when someone rips off my themes and posts lightly modified versions with altered footer credits. As long as the themes can help someone, I'm happy about it.

The "making money" part

While the theme sponsorship offers are very good and honestly painful to turn down sometimes, I am still happy as long as I have the option of having regular design credits in the themes I design for WordPress. Most theme users keep the credits, which sends visitors to this site. Since I have the commercial templates store (through 4templates.com) and the 8 text link ads in the sidebar of my front page, I make money out of the work anyway. I will never get rich from giving away my work for free, but I am able to keep this site online and hopefully soon give the site a proper update and a very much needed re-design.

I am also accepting donations over PayPal (click here for donation link), and thanks to your generous support I can spend a few hours every day on helping template and theme users for free. I am also able to work for free with customization and implementation of templates for different charity projects, and for non-profit organisations - something that has given me a lot of inspiration in return. With the new design, I will launch a "Thank you!"-section in the sidebar and on a separate page of this site, where I post the names and links of the people who support my work with donations. You are a great help, and of course I appreciate it a lot!

The focus

Depending on the outcome of the WordPress theme debate, I may possibly step back from the theme world and put the main focus on the website templates again. I will still continue to build WordPress themes (I have three new themes ready for release right now!), but I may not be able to provide the same amount of time to support theme users. But I don't know about that yet, it depends on the outcome of the discussions and the expected new rules and boycotts of themes that have "improper" links in them. I am not going to sit around if people see me as a bad-guy, because I hate that feeling. But if common sense wins over the angry demands, I will be happy to continue to build public themes that I give away (and support) for free. More about that later…

For now, this site is the main priority. I have built more than 30 WordPress-based websites in the last 6 months, including Tjuvlyssnat.se, but I still haven't implemented sidebar widgets into my own site! I'm still stuck with the same hardcoded menus and boring design that I've had for almost a year now. But that will change. I know I've said it before, and I know you don't believe me when I say it again. But I'll do my best to surprise you. I'm back from a period of stress and bad health, and the summer is soon here. I hope it will help me get the work done…

Final words and shorties

We lost a loved one two days ago. It is not fair at all. It never is…

Huge blog post coming up: "The fifth Lagoona album". I've been writing on that post for two months now, it will be fun to publish once it is ready for it!

Current number of templates that are ready for release on this site: 7. All new designs, not modifications of old templates.

Now I'm home again, after a nice weekend in Porjus. Since I've been in a bad shape for a while, I didn't have the energy and inspiration stay very long. Instead, I went back home directly after the birthday party yesterday night. But it was still a great night with lots of laughter and a few tears as well. There were old friends of my father, as well as neighbours and of course also family members and relatives of all ages. We all had a great dinner, heard several few of dads classic stories and just had the good time I hoped to have. Thanks everyone for a great night!

Bad shape, yes…

I will write a longer post about this in a few days, but I still want to write a few paragraphs here so that people understand why I have been hard to reach for a while - and why I may be hard to reach over the next couple of days as well.

Since the end of February, one or a few members of an interest group have been contacting me regarding a blog that they were strongly offended by. The blog was not mine, and it was written by an anonymous writer in a language that I don't understand. At first, I didn't know what the site was all about, but I could see that the site was built with WordPress and a theme that was partially based on one of my website templates. It was also obvious that this group did not agree with whatever the blog wrote, and that they thought that it was my blog since my name was listed in the design credits in the site footer.

For about three weeks now, I have tried to explain that the site is not mine - and that I have no contact information for the site owner. I have also explained that I did not even create the theme, only the original website template which the theme was based on. I have repeated the words from my contact page, writing the line "I can't answer for any other site than my own" over and over again. But the group does not accept that simple fact, and their messages have grown from being angry e-mails into being ugly and detailed threats and disturbing images and video clips. They still consider me personally responsible for the content of the blog - even though it makes no sense at all. I wrill write more about this later, for now I'm focusing on the simple background.

I tried to end the communication by explaining that I did not want them to contact me again, as it was a waste of time if they couldn't accept my explanations. But I have got more and more messages - and not only in the e-mail inbox. I have got direct threats over the instant messenger as well, and when the phone started ringing and I started getting SMS messages about that blog, then it had gone too far.

The final notice

I usually don't want to go public with misunderstandings like this, since it is not a fun topic to write about. But with this explanation I am also providing one last chance for the group to stop contacting me. If I get as much as one more message from the group, or from any of its members, or from any other people that the group have asked to e-mail me only to agree with their opinion, I will write out all the details so that all my readers will find out who these people are and how they work.

I know that they don't want that to happen, they have threatened with "punishments" if I would "declare war" (as they call it). Now, no matter what they believe about me, they get this final chance: Stop contacting me, the discussion ends here. Ok? Good.

End of discussion.

Catching up

The stress and all the worrying made me sick, and I couldn't get much work done last week. That resulted in several failed deliveries and disappointed clients, and it has seriously hurt both my reputation and myself. This means a lot of extra work, explanations, apologies, reduced income and lost projects. The next couple of weeks will be rough, no doubt about that. I need to make a number of changes to the templates, to my contact page and to my site in general to make everything even more clear. And I need to deliver the projects that are delayed.

I have no idea when I'll be back by the computer and working as usual again. Hopefully, if the group would step back now, I could be back in a few days. I also hope to get a new mobile phone during the week, and as soon as I get it I will abandon my old phone number and get a new one. I hope that I will be able to keep my e-mail address and the contact form online in the future as well, but if there are still problems with those things I will probably go for an update there too…

As promised, I will write more about this in a later post. I will not write more about the people who are responsible about this situation, unless they continue to waste my time. Don't ask about them, or about the blog. But feel free to write about your own experiences from similar misunderstandings. I know I am not the first web designer who has this problem, it is common among template designers and theme coders. Feel free to post a comment if it has happened to you, and share any tips and ideas that you may have!

Edit (March 20th): Case closed!

I did get one more message from the group, but it was a good one. I did not get any kind of apology, but atleast a promise that from now on they would "make sure to contact the site owner rather than the site designer". They are obviously still believing that I am the "site designer", but the only thing I care about right now is that they leave me out of the discussion for good. I have got their word on that, so I will leave this story behind now and put my energy on better things.

Thanks to everyone who have sent feedback, advices and shared their own experiences! It was not fun to find out that many of my friends and colleagues have experienced similar situations without ever going public with it. This needs to be discussed further to find good ways to avoid similar problems in the future…

The first public version of WP-Andreas00 has now been uploaded to the WordPress Theme Viewer. Since it seems to work pretty well for those who have tested it, I decided to upload it after only a small amount of testing. There may still be bugs and errors to be found, so please report any problems to me so I can fix it quickly. General feedback is of course also welcome!

Check out the WP-Andreas00 live demo or download the theme directly! (hosted by the official WordPress Theme Viewer)

WP-Andreas00 is just what people have asked for. It is simple, lightweight, has no advanced features and is easy to modify and customize. In other words, it is more useful than cool. It supports WordPress widgets in both the left and the right sidebar. Blog pages use the 3-column layout, regular content pages use a 2-column layout - just as it works in WP-Andreas01. The main difference from 01 is that the main menu now shows subpages as well - there is no separate subpage menu - and that the header image is now shown as a background through the stylesheet and not as an image tag in the markup.

More releases will follow over the next couple of days and weeks!

I usually don't ask for it in the blog, but I need to speed up the process a bit. I need help with basic testing of a couple of new themes for WordPress that I will release as soon as they are ready for it. I may also need help with porting some of the new and currently unreleased templates into WordPress themes. I know that many of you have offered to help me with this, but if I dive into the e-mail archive to find all the old promises I've made about that I will never get the actual work done…

If any of you who read this knows how to implement a custom header image in a WordPress theme (likeon WordPress.com), I would appreciate some help since one of the upcoming themes (WP-Andreas00) could really use that feature. It would be nice to have in WP-Andreas01 too, but I don't have the skill to add it myself…

If you want to help out, write a comment to this post and remember to include your e-mail address. I'll send out themes (and/or the templates) to those who can test the material over the next 24 hours and send me a bug report back. When I have got ahead of the bug list, I will release the themes and a first set of templates. Hopefully on Friday afternoon!

The winner of the Swedish TV-show Idol 2006, Markus Fagervall from Övertorneå, has launched a new website at MarkusFagervall.se. The site is based on WordPress with my theme WP-Andreas01, which was a happy surprise. I have seen Markus perform a number of times over the years when his band and my band has played on the same music festivals (like Jokkmokksfestivalen and Snabelfestivalen in Boden), and he is a great singer and artist with a long and solid musical background.

Edit: The domain is owned by Markus' label, Sony BMG, so it is an official website. The site shows upcoming promo events and has direct links to view Markus' video and purchasing his first single "Everything changes", so it is useful for anyone who has followed the show. I hope that Markus and the label will stick with the theme for a while, it would be fun since we are both from northern Sweden. Övertorneå is not very far from Jokkmokk…

In any case, I wish Markus the very best of luck!