A friend of mine recently expressed their confusion over the GPL and how it all relates to the recent bruhaha happening in WordPress land. A quick search on Google will reveal a number of people attempting to answer the same question. Here is my own attempt to answer this question, paying special attention to how this may relate to WordPress themes and plugins.

In an effort to further everyone's understanding of the GPL, let me see if I can shed some light on what the GPL is and how it works.

1. The GPL governs ones rights to redistribute software using the GPL as a license.

2. The GPL gives me the right to take GPL code and redistribute it as is (provided that I also respect any related trademarks). For example, I can't take Firefox and redistribute it under the name "Firefox" since the name is a trademark owned by Mozilla and only they have the right to convey its name on software.

3. Believe it or not, the GPL also allows people to sell copies of GPL software. Most people don't understand this for one simple reason, "why buy the cow when I can get the milk for free." Selling GPL software just doesn't make sense in that regard. But it has been done very successfully. People used to sell Linux on CD - but the value of doing so was clear: at the time to download Linux could take days, so for many shelling out $29.95 for the 5 of so CDs was a huge convenience.

4. The GPL also says that you can take GPL software, and modify it and redistribute it as well. For example, Microsoft could take the OpenOffice suite, make tons of changes (under auspices of making it better) and then turn right around and sell it. --- There is a catch though, any change you make to GPL software AND also redistribute you must also make available under the same license. In other words, Microsoft would need to make any changes they made to Open Office freely available to others.

   Note: the key here is "redistribution." Because the GPL governs distribution only, it means that I could, as an individual, take OpenOffice, make changes of my own that are TOTALLY AWESOME (naturally) and, provided that I never give a copy of that software to a friend or anyone else, I would never have to share my modifications.

   Another Note: the above note is important because this is why it is reasonable and acceptable for someone to download a copy of WordPress, modify it, pay a consultant to modify it, add features to it, redesign it, etc, etc, etc. and never be compelled to share the mods they have made, or be compelled to open source anything else in their organization.

5. The GPL also says I can take a portion of code from a GPL program and include it in my own. For example, say I want to write a blogging platform in Perl. I have written most of the code myself, but I deem Movable Type's commenting system to be perfect. So I cut and paste large portions of it into my software. Under the GPL, this is equivalent to forming a derived work, and my new blogging platform is compelled to be GPL as well.

Now let's look at what makes the WordPress theme debate special:

• The GPL defines something called a "derivative work." When I take Firefox, edit the source, recompile and redistribute it, that forms an obvious derivative work. All derivative works are bound by the terms of the GPL.

• The GPL also defines a derivative work as a piece of software that runs in the same shared memory space as a GPL program. In layman's terms this means that if a piece of software, say a theme or plugin (even it is distributed separately from the another piece of GPL software), is designed to run in conjunction with GPL software, then the two of them, by virtue of sharing the same memory/process when they run form a derivative work, and thus, the theme/plugin is bound by the GPL.

Ok, why the debate?

Well, their is some ambiguity over what forms a derivative work. I believe this stems from the fact that most people don't understand technically the concept of "shared memory space." But I believe this FAQ answer from the FSF makes clear the intent of the licensor:

If a program released under the GPL uses plug-ins, what are the requirements for the licenses of a plug-in?

If the program dynamically links plug-ins, and they make function calls to each other and share data structures, we believe they form a single program, which must be treated as an extension of both the main program and the plug-ins. This means the plug-ins must be released under the GPL or a GPL-compatible free software license, and that the terms of the GPL must be followed when those plug-ins are distributed. (emphasis mine)

So, although the Free Software foundation states their belief that this forms a derivative work, their own language admits that it does not conclusively do so.

But Byrne, I still don't understand all this techno-mumbo-jumbo. Just tell me, why is there a debate?

Let's clarify one more thing that I have seen many people get confused about. The GPL is NOT law. It is just a contract between two parties. If those two parties have a dispute over the terms, or their interpretation of the contract, then it is up to a judge to resolve the dispute and assess damages.

What makes the GPL special with regards to contracts is that is a standardized one. Meaning tons of people have accepted and/or conveyed the license to others. So if a judge rendered a judgement that helped to resolve the ambiguity of what constitutes a derivative work, then just like that, we would have legal precedence to reinforce anyone else's claims contingent upon this definition.

Finally, let's suppose Matt does sue Chris Pearson, what could he actually get from Chris?

I do not personally think Matt can claim that he has suffered any damages (e.g. lost revenue) from Chris' distribution of a proprietary theme, so I don't think a law suit would result in any money changing hands. But Matt can ask a judge to compel him to comply with the license and force him, by way of a court order, to distribute his themes according to the terms of the GPL. That's it.

And that is my take on the GPL, especially with regards to themes. I have my opinion as to whether Chris should open source his themes, but at the end of the day it doesn't matter what I think because in my mind this amounts to nothing more than a contract dispute between Chris and Matt. So, have at it guys. Wait, let me get some popcorn.

Ok, now have at it.

To my Movable Type fans and followers, I apologize for not posting here more frequently about Movable Type. You will find that I have moved a lot of my Movable Type blogging to two places:

• Endevver's Blog - where I work
• Melody's Blog - where I play

My most recent post however is one that I feel warrants being cross posted, because it is news I am particular excited about. From the blog post on Melody:

A couple of weeks ago I posted my thoughts on creating a new packaging format for Melody plugins and its advantages:

The biggest advantage to [this new packaging format] is to allow us to use github to automate plugin and theme installation and upgrades because now one could easily do this: (snip)

What I am snipping out of the above quote are some geeky command lines which illustrate how to checkout a project from git. Such command line snippets now seem anachronistic given that the community has taken a major step in implementing this vision through a new plugin which, after a little TLC, will find its way right into Melody.

What is most exciting I think is the path and roadmap this plugin squarely puts us on. From the plugin's README:

This plugin is part of a larger effort to completely overhaul how plugins are discovered, installed and managed in Movable Type and Melody. The roadmap for this plugin is for it to interface directly with a centralized plugin directory managed by the community. In this capacity, the need to enter a git url at all will be completely obviated. Instead, users will search for the plugin they want from within Melody, and then click "install." The directory will know the git URL so users don't have to.

First of all let me personally thank iThemes who originally subsidized the development of the Contact Forms plugin for donating the plugin to the Movable Type open source community! I am proud to call everyone at iThemes a friend.

Now, onto the show. I am happy to announce the final stretch for the plugin as we gear up for a formal production ready release. The plugin was revamped so that it could act more reliably as a "Movable Type Mail Form Processor" - on steroids of course. It has been more or less completely redesigned with a lot of focus being paid to a more polished user experience.

Once the plugin is complete, I will post all of the details and documentation over at Endevver. In the meantime, I thought people might like to see a few screenshots of the work in progress.

You can download the latest version of the Contact Forms plugin over at github and get support over at Endevver's tender.

(screenshots after the jump)

In a project I have been working on I have had the need to revisit an old plugin of mine: the Contact Form plugin. When designing the inquiry management screen the plugin I thought it would be a nice user experience to mimic Outlook as much as possible thinking that a familiar interface for a similar activity would be ideal. This is what I came up with:

The theory was a good one, but in practice the constraints of the Movable Type user interface often made the interactions a little awkward. A UI model like the split pane browser in this context really needs a lot more screen real estate to work effectively, otherwise the user spends too much time scrolling for no logical reason.

So in returning to this plugin, I wanted to improve upon this user experience. So the first thing I did was start to look at how others are managing a similar user experience: comment management. Let's take a look:

Drupal

Two words: God Awful. Next!

WordPress

True to form WordPress delivers a highly functional interface. All the actions a user is likely to want to perform are clearly visible. Although one criticism I have heard (although poorly illustrated by the above screenshot), is that the UI in displaying the full comment often overwhelms the visual experience. This is a problem shared by Movable Type as well.

The fact that WordPress also let's you expand the table to the full width of the page also helpful in that it removes distractions from the UI allowing users to more easily focus on the task they are engaged in.

On the downside, the tabular layout seems to be a UI constraint that is not easily dealth with. It forces whitespace into several columns which is not needed and results in a UI that lacks polish.

Movable Type

Movable Type is not bad, but it is far from good. Mainly the links users most want to click on, like "Reply" and "Edit" are hard to see, not to mention the fact that a single click "Report as Spam" and "Delete" actions aren't offered at all. Plus, the content on the page feels really dense - not an effective use of whitespace at all.

Also the lack of userpics forces users to scan more intensely for who comments are from.

TypePad

TypePad by far has the most polished UI for managing comments visually. It is a very effective use of space, especially considering that the comment listing table is a fixed width.

I like the fact that the table has no table header -- because let's be honest, it is simply not needed. The data makes the subject of each column obvious - labels are simply unnecessary. Second, I like the fact that actions have been differentiated from the comment's status and that the current status of a comment is very clear without having to spell it out "Published" or "Reported as Spam," etc.

Although it suffers from the same problem as WordPress in that a single long comment can easily dominate the page. Also, the help text is nice, but as you become more familiar with the UI is becomes unnecessary and distracting. It would be nice to be able to dismiss it all together and let the UI claim that space for the table.

Final Observation

One final observation: I was shocked to see the use of AJAX almost entirely absent from every platform. This is 2010 folks. Can we at least handle deleting comments and reporting them as spam via a process that is not disruptive to my primary activity: processing and triaging comments?

Contact Form Inquires

Considering all of the user experiences, I endeavored to take what I liked about each and fix what I thought was broken to come up with a user interface for managing comment form inquiries, which could easily be applied to comments. This is what I came up with.

And because screenshots don't illustrate these things, here are some details:

• No one comment can dominate the page, but any long comment can easily be expanded or collapsed if you want.

• Replying to comments, deleting inquires and reporting them as spam are handled via AJAX so that users never have to wait for the page to reload to go on to processing the next comment.

• I got rid of the iframe-powered dialog of Movable Type because it simply took too long to load. I converted it to a pure-jQuery dialog so that it appears almost instantaneously.

• I added the polish of animation so that elements fade and ease quickly into or out of view. This helps the page transition more easily from one state to another without the user feel the jarring effect of the page shifting up and down as elements disappear or appear.

• I am tracking the state of inquiries to know whether you have read them or not, whether they have been replied to or not, etc. That way you can at a glance see what is new and what requires action.

• I got rid of the table column headers.

• All actions one might want to take are clearly visible and accessible via a single click.

Technically this screen is for processing contact form inquiries, but it would be trivial to apply to main comment listing so it is only a matter of time.

In the meantime, I would be curious to hear feedback from Movable Type users, and the thoughts from others about what makes a good comment management experience. Is there a tool you use and love that I have not taken a look at, but should?

Not too long ago Amazon made some important changes to its API to improve security, but this change had the unfortunate result of breaking Media Manager. My knee-jerk reaction was to just go into my code and implement the API change directly in my custom built Amazon API library -- because hey, it would fix the problem and allow me to go about my day. But working on Melody has been a reminder to me about how important it is to drop proprietary code in favor of third party libraries when they emerge. It is not always the easy thing to do, because it often requires a huge effort to rewire your code to a new library, but in most cases it is the right thing to do because in the long run it will:

• Consolidate development around a library that more people will benefit from.
• Bring more features to your users faster.
• Allow you to leverage documentation written and maintained by someone else.
• Increase the size of your support community.

And that is what I did with Media Manager. I dropped all of my old proprietary Amazon API code in favor of a widely used, well supported CPAN module called Net::Amazon. In the process I dramatically simplified my code base, I incorporated more features that have emerged from Amazon's API since I initially wrote Media Manager, and made the framework easier to extend and use. All in all, it is proving to be a great change for the plugin that brings more features and capabilities to Media Manager users.

However, this change may also mean changes for its users. For a lot of Media Manager users, this new version may mean that your template code will no longer work. This change which breaks backwards compability was unfortunate, but to a great extent unavoidable, especially if I wanted to maximize the end-user benefits for shifting to Net::Amazon. So if you are an existing user of Media Manager and are anxious to restore interoperability with Amazon, then please consult Media Manager's new documentation with its many template code samples to see what changes you might need to update your blog's templates.

You can download Media Manager 2.1 from github, and file support tickets and bug reports in lighthouse. Please, if you have problems, let me know so that I fix them as soon as possible.

Media Manager provides users and authors within Movable Type and Melody with the ability to search and insert media from a number of popular remote services like Amazon and YouTube. Using Media Manager one can open a dialog, enter a few search terms, select the book, DVD or video and optionally insert it into a blog post.

Once the media item has been selected it is automatically inserted into Movable Type or Melody's asset management system and can be view by going to "Manage Assets" under the Manage menu.

Installation

To install this plugin follow the instructions found here:

http://tinyurl.com/easy-plugin-install

Prerequisites

Keep in mind that before installing Media Manager you need to make sure you have:

• Movable Type 4.01 or greater.
• Digest::SHA perl module
• Cache::File perl module

Download

Download Media Manager from github.

Resources

For Media Manager

• Template Tag Documentation
• Frequently Asked Questions

Related

• Melody
• MovableType
• Media Manager Homepage
• Amazon Web Services
• Net::Amazon

Bug Reports

You can file bug reports here:

• Via the Web
• Via Email

Help and Donations

Media Manager represents a lot of work by one individual. While the author is happy to write this software, and support it completely free of charge, the author also appreciates and form of support you can provide. Please consult the following URL to learn more:

http://www.majordojo.com/projects/mediamanager.php

Copyright

(c) 2007-2008 Six Apart, Ltd. (c) 2009 Byrne Reese

License

Media Manager is licensed under the Artistic License.

Q: What is the difference between version 2.1 and 2.0?

A: In 2009 Amazon made a significant change to their AWS Product Marketing API on top of which Media Manager and MTAmazon are built. Media Manager 2.1 contains the fixes and changes necessary to make Media Manager work once again with Amazon.

In updating the software to work with Amazon's new API, Media Manager was overhauled to utilize the CPAN module Net::Amazon. For most people this is meaningless, so let me explain. Net::Amazon is a library, a small bit of software that talks to Amazon's APIs on behalf of Media Manager. The library is maintained by a third party and far more flexible and performant than anything that has previously shipped with Media Manager.

Q: What are the changes between version 1.0 and 2.0?

A: Media Manager 2.0 is a dramatic evolution from its predecessor. Media Manager now integrates far more seamlessly with Movable Type then ever before.

In this rearchitecture of the software, however, I redefined what the goals of the software are and adjusted the scope and feature set of the product to meet those goals. For example, Media Manager 1.0 was an evolution of BookQueue and BookQueueToo, which by their name should indicate that they presumed you were managing books alone. As a result Media Manager 1.0 allowed users to set the "status" of an item as either "reading," "read" or "unread."

That is flawed assumption, especially in light of the fact that those statii are irrelevant to CD's not to mention patio furniture - both of which are available through Amazon. What follows is a list of features that have been REMOVED:

• item statuses - users are encouraged to use Movable Type's built in tagging system to manage the state of an item
• reviews - now that Movable Type allows users to insert assets directly in their posts, there is no need to support the concept of a "review."
• ratings - ratings were associated with reviews in previous versions and since reviews are gone, so are ratings
• list import - i suspect many users did not make use of this feature so the ability to import items from an Amazon Wishlist has been removed
• finished on date - yeah, sorry about this one for now

Q: Is Media Manager 1.0 forward compatible with Media Manager 2.0?

A: Items found in Media Manager 1.0 will automatically be ported into the new Media Manager 2.0 and Movable Type 4.0 system. However, not all data will be carried over. Reviews, ratings, and statii will NOT be ported over. Not yet anyways.

Q: Will my Media Manager 1.x template tags work with MT4 and MM2.0?

A: No they will not. To simplify the code base and bring focus to the Media Manager application, all legacy template tags have been removed. Movable Type's core template tag set should be sufficient for anything most users need to do.

This weekend I was pleasantly surprised by an email from Aaron Stone, the lead engineer of modperlite -- a project the two of us had started while we were both at Six Apart focused on addressing ways to dramatically improve performance for Movable Type. Aaron had done a lot of the initial groundwork for the project technically, but eventually got consumed by other projects in need of his expertise; a trend that did not stop when he moved on to Google.

I had in fact began recruiting for engineering talent to contract with to complete the project. But then this weekend, I got an email from Aaron out of the blue informing me that he finished the work on mod_perlite and tested it with Movable Type... and it worked!

This is a tremendous milestone for the project and puts us in a position for the first time to see if the original hypothesis for the project holds water: that we could make Perl applications as brain-numbingly easy to install as PHP-based ones, and that we could also help make all CGI faster and more memory efficient in the process.

• Learn more on the modperlite website.
• Download modperlite from github (official distributions to come soon).

I have a love/hate relationship with Amazon right now as they recently made changes to their Amazon Product Advertising API that has broken Media Manager. Now I have numerous users tapping their feet anxiously waiting for an update, during a time in which I really should be working. I have only myself to blame though as Amazon gave me more than enough warning of this change, emailed me numerous times warning me about it, and honestly did all that a services provider should do to inform me of this impending change and its consequences. But naturally I procrastinated, and now I must reap what I sow.

On the flip side, this change has forced me to crack open one of my oldest plugins, one built with a great deal of duct tape and chicken wire, and retool it to be slightly more modern. Most users of course won't appreciate or notice a change, but I myself am relieved to finally replace all of my home-grown web services code, with a more stable and tested equivalent. This hopefully will make it easier for me to add features in the future and not cringe quite as much whenever a user reports a bug.

So while I privately curse Amazon under my breath, Media Manager and Movable Type users can thank Amazon for forcing me to finally devote some time to this plugin.

And that's the good news: Media Manager is getting a much needed overhaul: it is being updated to work with Amazon's new API restoring its operability; and I am making this work available for download today. The bad news is that this work is not 100% complete, so I must beg the for the community's continued patience and understanding in that this overhaul will take a little more time to complete. In the meantime, those willing to experiment with something that is partially complete, you can download and follow my progress with Media Manager over at github, and you can report bugs via the web and email over at Lighthouse.

As my life has been slowly re-attaining equilibrium after having a second child, I have still somehow managed to find time to make things. Thank god, because making things keeps me sane when life wants to dog pile my schedule, and my personal, professional and family life. Of course I have never really stopped making things, I have only struggled to find the time to tell people about the things I have made.

So today I break the silence and begin to catch you up with some of the many things I have made recently. The first thing I want to tell you about is a new tool I am especially proud of: Image Cropper.

Image Cropper is a plugin, sponsored by Talking Points Memo (an Endevver client) and donated to the Melody and Movable Type open source community, that helps bloggers compose and craft the images used on a web site to promote their content and stories. Of course Movable Type and Melody both possess the ability to do this today natively, but the difference between an amateur and a professional blog like Talking Points Memo, is the time and care they put into the polish they put into every single blog post. TPM for example employs producers to create these images and thumbnails manually because Movable Type's default behavior is ultimately insufficient. To see what I mean, let's look at a quick example.

Suppose we are composing a story about a visit between Barack Obama and Nicolas Sarkozy and we have the following photograph to accompany the story:

One thing you may notice about the photo is that the primary subjects of the photo are not centered in the photograph. This poses a problem because the thumbnail Movable Type will create for you automatically will crop out one or more of the primary subjects from the photo. Furthermore, at such a small size, the thumbnail created makes it difficult to determine who the primary subjects even are. This is why Talking Points Memo relied on a manual process to create these thumbnails so that they could produce the best possible result for their readers. Enter Image Cropper.

With Image Cropper we can override the default thumbnail and specify our own to produce an undeniably better result -- all from within Movable Type.

Furthermore, Image Cropper allows you to fine tune the file size and image quality of the image generated as well as annotate the image with text so that you can attach a photo credit or by-line.

To show you how easy it is to create results like this, here is a quick demonstration of the plugin in action:

To learn more about the plugin and to download it, visit the plugin's homepage over at Endevver. And if you need my help with a project, send us a note.

People who know me, know that I love Movable Type. In fact I have devoted much of the last five years to the product and its community. Therefore it gives me great pride and much relief to be a part of the launch of Melody, a new community-driven content management and blogging platform based upon Movable Type.

I have written extensively about what motivated me and others to create this project so I won't bother recapitulating that here.

What is likely to get lost today in whatever attention this humble project is likely to attract is any mention of the people who have helped take this project this far. Without the dedication of these people over the past six years Movable Type would be a fundamentally different product than it is today, and Melody might never have happened. So I would like to carve out a little space to say thank you to the following contributors to Melody and my friends:

• Jay Allen - While I have been remiss in mentioning it here, Jay and I are now partners in what is becoming a very successful Movable Type (and now Melody) consulting business. For Melody Jay has been playing the role of lead developer by helping manage code merges with Movable Type, organizing our source code and writing all of our developer contribution guidelines.

• Jesse Gardner - I have worked with Jesse for years. It was a pleasure to work with him on the design of Movable Type [dot org] and an even greater privilege to work with him on what I think is a damn fine looking web site and the home for our new community: OpenMelody.org.

• Tim Appnel - Tim has been a dutiful project manager as well as our system administrator taking on the unglamorous and thankless task of setting up servers, managing ACLs, and all the other stuff that makes the bits and bytes flow as God intended.

• Dan Wolfgang - Dan built out our web site, and has been first in line to take stuff off of people's plates when they become too full. Never under-estimate the value of load balancing people. Seriously.

• Mark Stosberg - Mark's invaluable experience in serving on the boards of several non-profits has helped us greatly in our process of writing our own by-laws for the Open Melody Software Group. He is also our unofficial ambassador to the greater Perl community in CPAN, where he helps to maintain a number of modules.

• Su - I have never known Su to be one who likes the lime light, so I will simply say this: he has been a consistent and reliable voice of reason within our group, which is essential when dealing with so many people who are as passionate as we are.

• Arvind Satyanarayn - The famous Movable Type prodigy-kid and author of Custom Fields took a break from college girls and parties to help contribute much needed code and infrastructure that will undoubtedly become essential to the project. He also surprised us all by merging all of Movable Type 4.261 into the latest development branch of Melody - hoooo-aaaah!

Finally, I would like to thank Six Apart. There is no doubt that many people will want to spin this initiative by the community in a way that impugns the company and the many people who work there and whom I call a friend. There is no way around the simple and basic truth: without them, this project would not exist and without their support of the project, I doubt it could reach its fullest potential.

And after all is said and done, this is what Melody is all about: these people, our community, and the many people who will follow. Thank you!

Since releasing the Hybrid News Theme I have been contacted by a number of people on the ProNet mailing list asking me to shed some light on the process of creating template sets, or themes as most other products call them, for Movable Type. As I embark on creating this documentation I stumbled across a video made by a friend of mine on the same subject (mental note: subscribe to plasticmind.tv).

Jesse does a good job I think I showing that template sets are sincerely not that difficult and that anyone who can cobble together a WordPress theme, can easily create one for Movable Type. I would like to mention another tool at your disposal which will make this process even easier: it is called exportts. The program is a simple perl script that you can drop into your Movable Type tools directory to easily export the templates in a blog and then package them up as an installable template set or theme. All in one simple step.

The exportts tool is something I find indispensable in my work as it saves me literally hours of monotonous and menial labor. Its readme should explain exactly how it works if you want to learn more.

I hope this video helps though, while I document the process more thoroughly.

Hats off the WordPress community and Matt Mullenweg's insistence to promote open source design. Thanks to his philosophy and the courage of designers from the WordPress community, I am able to bring the Hybrid News Theme to Movable Type.

The Hybrid News Theme is the first newspaper theme for the Movable Type platform and enabled users to easily create a newspaper style web site:

If you are looking for the Hybrid News theme for WordPress, please visit their website.

Live Demo

View the live demo.

Download the Beta

This theme requires Movable Type Pro at is relies on custom fields for many of its advanced features.

• Download the latest

Bug Reports

This is beta software and is constantly being improved. Please submit bug reports at the following web site:

• Lighthouse Hybrid News Project
• Or submit them via email, making sure to use a descriptive subject header.

Installation

This plugin requires Movable Type Pro. It does not yet work with Movable Type Open Source. It is certainly my intent to support MTOS and Melody, just not at this time.

This plugin is installed just like any other Movable Type Plugin.

You will also need to install the following plugins:

• Config Assistant 1.01.
• Custom CSS
• Order 1.0
• Image Cropper 1.0

Features

• SEO enhanced:
  • Alternate HTML