Several people have asked about what had happened to the Brian’s Revolution 2 themes…

Apparently, a few weeks after we reported on the open sourcing and public availability of the unveiled Revolution 2 themes for WordPress, there was a change of heart, apparently. All of the links that we described in detail were yanked, with no explanation on the site itself. This led to the inevitable searching by interested webbies looking for the open source themes.

With a little uncovering, on the Revolution 2 themes forum, as well as other WordPress-related discussion sites, you may spot the reasons tossed around concerning why the download links were removed. The biggest reason appears to be that the free downloads were a marketing ploy which may not have worked out as well as Brian & Co. wished, so they just stopped offering the themes for free.

Now, the Revolution 2 themes were announced to be GPL’ed under the same WordPress GPL license. Which means that you, as a responsible GPL-adhering programmer, have the ability to make changes to your Revolution 2 themes that you already have, as long as you comply with the terms of that GPL license.

“Hey, where can I download those open sourced Revolution themes? I can’t find them!”

A couple of months ago, I’d posted about the change of heart (and licensing) of the Revolution WordPress themes. Since then, there were certainly plenty of goings-on over at the Revolution theme site, including a “branching” of the regularly supported premium themes and the appearance of the new Revolution 2 open source themes.

However, even though you may have found the new open source theme site, you may have experienced trouble finding the downloadable themes.

The Old Revolution

Perhaps you started your search by dropping by the old Revolution theme site.

Er-- Isn't this still the same old stuff?

“Hmm, this stuff looks exactly like the old stuff! It’s still not open source!”

Yep, you’d be right. But if you clicked around that site to find out more information, you’d eventually come across an unusual redirect to the new Revolution 2 theme site. (Or you just ran a Web search and found what looked like the new site anyway…)

Clicking that footer link will send you to the new Revolution 2 theme site...

The New Revolution (Two)

Once you land on the Revolution 2 site, you’ll be able to browse the open source themes… but wait! Where do you actually download the themes? There are plenty of links that seem to support purchasing a premium theme, but what about the free ones?

Look for that terse "download" link in the asterisked warning, toward the bottom of the theme detail page.

You need to review each of the offered themes, and on each of the detail pages (not the demo pages), you should see an asterisked note stating that you get benefits with purchasing a Pro or Pro Plus package. The “Download unsupported version” statement and link should allow you to download the comparable open source version of the same theme.

Yep, folks, just like I mentioned earlier, Javamancy got its scheduled upgrade.

In addition to several color changes, the multimedia box (that’s the “picture box” in upper right hand side) has gotten a few new images that may interest you.

Compared to the previous Javamancy upgrade, this is not as dramatic, but it does provide additional theme elements that improve customization capabilities and sets a pathway for further expansion.

This is a fairly hefty update to Javamancy on its visual interface (user interface, ‘natch).

As you can see, the UI has changed to a completely different layout, with a dramatic shift in fonts and content placements. Also, there is a new image “rotator” in place.

And, thus far, no advertisements.

There are further UI customizations and tweaks coming in the very near future (throughout November, certainly). There may even be a quick poll added to Javamancy to capture your opinion concerning about the UI…

Brian Gardner, of the Revolution premium theme business fame, has announced that he will be placing the Revolution premium themes assets under the GPL open source license, starting November 1, 2008. Based upon the link that Brian included in his post, it appears what he may be referring to GPLv2, not the newer GPLv3.

This is excellent news for the open source community, particularly given that it always seemed peculiar that for something like PHP-based blogging, there would be the notion of free vs. commercial/paid themes. Providing technical services above an open source platform is a widely accepted business practice, and changing the terms of access and support for a commercial/paid theme to be in alignment with open source tenets makes good business sense, as well as instilling goodwill.

“Steve, what are you doing with all those themes? Isn’t one enough?”

Well, sometimes yes, and sometimes no.

I’ve seen some pretty innovative (and sometimes merely pretty) blog themes floating around out there, and I was thinking that it really makes sense to “open up” some of the internal UI testing that Javamancy and other visualization aspects of the more-established DevPal sites to you, the viewing public.

But rather than just bombard with stuff, I was contemplating popping up (at odd intervals) an occasional theme that is currently under review. Then, if you have any constructive comments you’d like to contribute, you could place them with this post or via the usual private method.

Note: Keep in mind that some of the blog themes that are being tested are not native to the WordPress format, so some features may function awkwardly. In fact, even some of the native WordPress themes are quite bug-ridden, too! :-O

I’ve been mildly irritated by the lack of the display of the posts’ time, as well as the lack of the display of the day’s name (Sunday, Monday, Tuesday, etc.), in the post header secondary line.

So, in typical Development in Anger fashion, I’ve gone ahead and modified the Cutline 3-Column 1.3 theme I’m currently using to provide both the day name and the time.

I had earlier planned on modifying the CSS styles associated with the HTML headings, but the issue of NOT displaying enough date/time info kept plaguing me too much.

I did notice, during UI testing, that since Cutline uses a fixed width, the header secondary line may run into multiple lines. For the time being, it’s okay, but eventually, that needs to be refactored for a cleaner presentation. The question is whether to expand the width to either a wider fixed expanse, or change it to a variable width (as wide as your screen will allow), or to reshape the header secondary line itself into at least two separate lines.

The Setup

When I set up the blog, I quickly realized that the default theme was too plain, so I rummaged around a bit and came across the Cutline theme. Not bad; in fact, a simple clean appearance. But I noticed that there was a slight problem with a couple of pages: the Archives and the Sitemap. Whenever you click the links, you’d get a 404. So what went wrong?

The Premise

Apparently, during Cutline’s initial configuration, there are additional steps required to preset the Archives and Sitemap pages. It isn’t immediately obvious, so putting the steps together took a little bit of time.

The Action

Here’s how it should work:

1. Install the Cutline theme as per usual.
2. Access the Site Admin panel.
3. Go to Design > Cutline Options.
4. Activate the checkbox to presumably activate the Archives page. Now, before I figured out the problem, I thought that it was going to be automagically prepped so the Archives page would work. According to the support forum, there was supposed to be default Archives page generated. In the case of this blog, however, it wasn’t…
5. Create a page, name it “Archives”, and set the Page Template to “Archives”. There should be two additional page templates shown in the dropdown list: Archives and Sitemap. We’ll use the Sitemap page template a few steps later.
6. Unlike the Archives page, there is no corresponding Cutline Options section for the Sitemap page…
7. Create another page, name it “Sitemap”, and set the Page Template to “Sitemap”.