Premium themes are still very expensive and they should be cheap.

It’s been like that for at least 5+ days, which shows the general quality level around here.

Matt, I wouldn’t talk. Since you put in the gravatars, the comment section of your site’s been borked in Netscape.

-KB

The proposed theme marketplace relates to wordpress.COM, not wp.ORG. Matt says this in his post.

You may want to re-read that statement. It also affects .org users as well because they’ll be getting free use of the themes that are submitted to the .com marketplace.

That also means that all themes in the marketplace will be available FREE to wordpress.org users.

Matt M.

Don’t jump to the conclusion that just because it’s a .com roll-out doesn’t mean it won’t affect the .org releases.

Wank and Small Potato both do a better job explaining why this is a bad idea than I can here.

-KB

Yes, this idea needs more clarification. But if Tony has seen fit to update his original post with this information, which you linked to, then this post should be updated as well.

And, if this indicates BlogHerald’s editorial policy, you’ve just lost a reader who won’t be clicking on any of your sponsored links in the future.

* Snap-view
* link to Ask.com which re-edits the entire post and inserts Snap-view automatically
* the “new” tags which lead to other people’s blog’s (and only to those with popular tags and blogs)

The “hidden” links to Matt’s and WordPress.com within the theme. Some of this is for generating user stats; don’t know about the rest.

WordPress.com becomes less accessible to many readers with these mandatory changes. As for writers and editors, superficial changes seem to have precedence over ease of use, such as a better search; bulk editing; blog indexing tools; same page preview; etc.

WordPress.com is advanced over many other blog platforms, but it is insufficient still for advanced communication. Seems to me that is the real potential strength (and potential money-maker spin-offs)– transforming WordPress into a communication tool for users without limits in time and space, rather than a personal showoff, subject to fashion.

Spin-offs for profit are fine; but not if we are all sucked into it.

A day after information is available that shows large chunks of the post are clearly wrong, you still have not updated it. That’s intellectually dishonest and rude to the WordPress community.

But yet it’s accpetable when you do it, Matt? There have been many times you’ve been “dishonest and rude” to the WordPress community and individuals within it but I never see any retraction from you.

Where did that come from? That shows lack of understanding over the sponsored themes issue. It was not about designers’ earning off their work — it was about imposing spammy links on users.

I’m not sure exactly what you mean. David brings up a number of points which are suggested but not explicitly mentioned in your post.

1. Automattic gets a 50% cut — this is something that’s intimated in your post when you talk about “splitting it in half”.

2. Set price — you don’t actually mention who sets the price

3. Exclusivity — you don’t actually mention explicitly about how themes could be marketed, unless the part you slipped in about themes needing to be GPL licensed; even there, you preface that sentence with “can’t be released anywhere else”.

I recognize that this is all still a work in progress, but I don’t think that its fair to characterize the post as having large portions that are wrong when your own post still has many questions that still need answering explicitly.