Sandbox Went to 1.0

I just noticed that Scott (in a comment on Ryan’s post about 2.3) has released version 1.0 of Sandbox specifically for WordPress 2.3.

Sheesh! Something else to play with! :)

BBH For Sandbox FTW!

Well, it’s not really surprising. A BBH* wins the Sandbox Design Competition. Don’t get me wrong, it’s a great looking theme, but it looks so much like so many others it’s no different to any of them. Personally, I think Prima is the best looking theme. Ok, I’m not a beige kinda guy so the colours might change a little but it’s not blue and, from the screenshot, it looks to be well laid out too.

Andy also mentions that Sandox will be upgraded for wordpress.com “very soon”.

*Big Blue Header. Ask That Girl Again.

Encrypted Footer Links in WP Themes

Mark Ghosh over at Weblog Tools Collection recently announced that he would refuse to promote themes with sponsorship links in the footer (or elsewhere). He runs a daily “WordPress Theme Releases” post which promotes new themes for non wordpress.com bloggers.

Matt also implemented an idea for the removal of sponsored themes from the “official” WordPress Theme Repository over at themes.wordpress.net.

Sponsored links are links that are put (normally) into the footer of a blog. Whenever an unsuspecting reader clicks the link the registered owner of the link (usually the theme designer through an affiliate program) gets paid a small amount. If a theme is popular (say 10,000 sites use it) and each one of those sites gets the link clicked once per day, well you do the maths for your currency. The other benefit to the sponsor (the person that owns the site the link directs to) is that when the search engines spider the site they will see the link and (in simple terms) bump the sponsor site up another notch.

Personally I think this is fantastic. Many thousands of designers and programmers spend many thousands of hours every year coding to improve WordPress. And WordPress is Open Source. Open Source means that you should never have to pay for the software. Some people see that as a great opportunity to make a free buck or three (it’s never likely to be more than that!) and I, among others don’t see why they should.

I stumbled across a blog post this afternoon that gives methods for encrypting the code for links within the WP footer. Rather than put the link in clear type in the footer (the usual method) it’s encrypted into a different file which makes it MUCH harder to find and remove.

What does this mean for Mark and Matt? Well, nothing really. If anyone tried to upload their theme to the repository it would be refused. That said, Matt and Mark are not the only ones offering themes. There are (again) thousands of sites offering “free” themes with much less scruples than the “official” sites.

Bloggers are simple folks, they like things easy. Making a link difficult to remove is just going to piss them off, create yet more work for the folks in the wordpress.org forums and generally get a bad reputation for the theme designer. Please, if you’re designing a theme, don’t put in the sponsored links (I just remove them straight away anyway) and really don’t encrypt the damned things!