- Intersecting the Community
WordPress thrives and grows based on community contributions in addition to sheer usage. Like high school gym class, participation is the name of the game, and several semi-formal avenues along which to channel your efforts and energies are available.
WordCamp events are community-hosted, locally operated, and now happen in dozens of cities around the world. Camps that reach critical mass are listed on wordcamp.org, but you’ll do just as well to search for a WordCamp event in a major city close to you. WordCamps occur nearly every weekend with bloggers, photographers, writers, editors, developers, and designers of all experience and skill levels counted among their attendees. WordCamps are a low-cost introduction to the local community and often a good opportunity to meet WordPress celebrities. Less structured but more frequently convened than WordCamps are WordPress Meetups, comprising local users and developers in more than 40 cities. You’ll need a meetup.com account, but once you’re registered you can check on locations and timetables at wordpress.meetup.com to see when and where people are talking about content management.
A rich, multi-language documentation repository is hosted at codex.wordpress.org. The WordPress Codex, with all due respect to the term reserved for ancient handwritten manuscripts, represents the community-contributed tips and tricks for every facet of WordPress from installation to debugging. It's a wiki with fourteen administrators and well over 70,000 registered users. If you feel the urge to contribute to the WordPress documentation, register and write away in the WordPress Codex. We hope you’ll find this book a cross between a companion and a travel guide to the Codex.
Finally, mailing lists (and their archives) exist for various WordPress contributors and communities. A current roster is available on-line at codex.wordpress.org/Mailing_Lists; of particular interest may be the WP-docs list for Codex contributors and the WP-hackers list for those who work on the WordPress core and steer its future directions.
- WordPress and the Gnu Public License
WordPress is licensed under the Gnu Public License (GPL) version 2, contained in the license.txt file that you’ll find in the top-level code distribution. Most people don’t read the license, and simply understand that WordPress is an open source project; however, pockets of corporate legal departments still worry about the viral component of a GPL license and its implications for additional code or content that gets added to, used with, or layered on top of the original distribution. Much of this confusion stems from liberal use of the words ‘‘free’’ and ‘‘copyright’’ in contexts where they are inappropriately applied.
We’re not lawyers, nor do we play them on the Internet or on television, and if you really want to understand the nuances of copyright law and what constitutes a conveyance of code, pick up some of Lawrence Lessig’s or Cory Doctorow's work in those areas. We include this section to assuage IT departments who may be dissuaded from using WordPress as an enterprise content management system by overly zealous legal teams. Don’t let this happen to you; again, if WordPress is acceptable to CNN and the Wall Street Journal, two companies that survive on the copyrights granted to their content, it probably fits within the legal strictures of most corporate users as well.
The core tenet of the GPL ensures that you can always get the source code for any distribution of GPL licensed software. If a company modifies a GPL-licensed software package and then redistributes that newer version, it has to make the source code available as well. This is the ‘‘viral’’ nature of GPL at work; its goal is to make sure that access to the software and its derivatives is never reduced in scope. If you plan on modifying the WordPress core and then distributing that code, you’ll need to make sure your changes are covered by the GPL and that the code is available in source code form. Given that WordPress is written in PHP, an interpreted language, distributing the software and distributing the source code are effectively the same thing.
Following are some common misconceptions and associated explanations about using WordPress in commercial situations.
‘‘Free software’’ means we can’t commercialize its use. You can charge people to use your installation of WordPress, or make money from advertisements running in your blog, or use a WordPress content management platform as the foundation of an online store. That's how wordpress.com works; it also
enables Google to charge advertisers for using their Linux-based services. You can find professional quality WordPress themes with non-trivial price tags, or you can pay a hosting provider hundreds or thousands of dollars a year to run your MySQL, PHP, Apache, and WordPress software stack; both involve commercialization of WordPress.
enables Google to charge advertisers for using their Linux-based services. You can find professional quality WordPress themes with non-trivial price tags, or you can pay a hosting provider hundreds or thousands of dollars a year to run your MySQL, PHP, Apache, and WordPress software stack; both involve commercialization of WordPress.
If we customize the code to handle our own {content types, security policies, obscure navigational requirements} we’ll have to publish those changes. You're only required to make the source code available for software that you distribute. If you choose to make those changes inside your company, you don't have to redistribute them. On the other hand, if you've made some improvements to the Word-Press core, the entire community would benefit from them. Getting more staid employers to understand the value of community contribution and relax copyright and employee contribution rules is sometimes a bit challenging, but the fact that you had a solid starting point is proof that other employers made precisely that set of choices on behalf of the greater WordPress community.
The GPL will infect content that we put into WordPress. Content — including graphical elements of themes, posts, and pages managed by WordPress — is separated out from the WordPress core. It’s managed by the software, but not a derivative of or part of the software. Themes, however, are a derivative of the WordPress code and therefore also fall under the GPL, requiring you to make the source code for the theme available. Note that you can still charge for the theme if you want to make it commercially available. Again, the key point here is that you make the source code available to anyone who uses the software. If you're going to charge for the use of a theme, you need to make the source code available under the GPL as well, but as pointed out previously, users installing the theme effectively get the source code.
More important than a WordPress history lesson and licensing examination are the issues of what you can do with WordPress and why you'd want to enjoy its robustness. The next section looks at WordPress as a full-fledged content management system, rather than simply a blog editing tool.
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