The Windows Tax

Now a fellow Open Source blogger and businessman, Dr Adrian Steel of Mercian Labels, is trying, so far without luck, to get the cost of an unwanted Windows License refunded from a company called Fonestop Ltd. He’s kindly providing an ongoing record of the correspondence between himself and the supplier whilst he seeks a fair refund for the software that he does not want nor require.

This example goes a long way to indicate why the bundling of software and hardware in this way is so wrong. It is incredibly hard to buy a computer in the UK that is not already infected with an inefficient, outdated, expensive, bloated and, still alarmingly, insecure operating system called Microsoft^® Windows^™. It is also becoming increasingly difficult to get even a partial refund due to the updated terms in the EULA that comes with version 7 of the OS (you can read most of the license agreements here):

By using the software, you accept these terms. If you do not accept them, do not use the software. Instead, contact the manufacturer or installer to determine its return policy. You must comply with that policy, which might limit your rights or require you to return the entire system on which the software is installed.

In earlier versions the statement about returning the entire system was not there. Here’s what the Vista EULA said:

By using the software, you accept these terms. If you do not accept them, do not use the software. Instead, contact the manufacturer or installer to determine their return policy for a refund or credit.

Reading Adrian’s struggle to get back the money that is rightfully his makes me quite angry. There are plenty of computer users that do not want or need Windows software when they buy a new computer. Even if they are not aware of the great Free Software operating systems such as Ubuntu or Fedora or many others, they probably already have a perfectly legal and valid CD of Windows in a drawer or cupboard anyway. Even I have a legal and valid Windows XP CD in my office; not that it ever gets used nowadays…

So what’s to be done? I really feel like starting some kind of campaign to get the lawmakers here and across the EU to make this kind of practice illegal. I as a consumer should be able to select and buy any computer I like and decide for myself if I wish to pay for a pre-installed operating system or not. That should be a choice I am free to make. Currently, apart from a few very brave and admirable vendors, I do not have this choice. And now it’s even harder to obtain a refund due to the change in the wording of Microsoft’s EULA.

These Brave and Admirable vendors deserve a mention:

• Brave because I’m sure that they will come under pressure from businesses like Microsoft to bundle their software and conform to the way that they want you to sell Computers.
• Admirable because they are standing up for something which is good and noble and may not be the most profitable course for their company to take.

As many of you know we started a website some time ago called Naked Computers to track these Brave and Admirable suppliers around the world. It’s been useful to many but it has been quite quiet recently and it could definitely do with a revamp to make it look more appealing (any WordPress Theme designers fancy knocking up a new look and feel for the site?).

In the UK there is one computer supplier that, in my humble opinion, should be applauded for their attitude: Novatech. I think that every machine they sell from their website or retail outlets are offered with or without an Operating System; it’s your choice. It’s quite interesting to look on their site and see just how expensive Windows really is: ~£70 to ~£800 or more!

Recently I noticed Novatech making a few noises on Twitter and I commented positively on their approach to selling naked computers. This was their reply to me:

@opensourcerer Thanks for recommending us, we sell all systems without operating systems as we like to give our customers a choice.

So come on you lot! Let’s try and come up with a plan, ideas and suggestions as to how to go about fixing this problem once and for all… Our company, The Open Learning Centre can host a wiki or something if needed but please use the comments here to start the ball rolling.

Are there any lawyers out there who fancy a challenge? Want to fight for Freedom and allow consumers to make their own choice rather than be forced to pay for something they frequently neither need nor want?

Finally, for those naive souls who believe that an EULA gives you some protection or guarantees, think again…

WordPress MU 2.8 Beginner's Guide

If you didn’t know, WordPress MU is the “Multi User” version of the very popular free and open source blogging software. MU allows you build a site where users can create and run their own individual blogs themselves. One of the best known examples is probably the WordPress.com site itself which serves tens of millions of hits on millions of blogs each day.

That’s a little background, now on with the book review itself.

Firstly, I was a bit confused by the title: “Beginner’s” and “WordPress MU” aren’t two words I would normally associate together. After all, a multi-user blogging farm capable of hosting literally millions of blogs doesn’t strike me as something a beginner would be doing. You can’t however judge a book by it’s cover as they say…

At approximately 250 pages the book is a reasonable size unlike some of those 1000+ page tomes that are too heavy to carry and won’t stay open due to the effects of gravity.

The book has a clearly stated objective:

This book will take you through the setup of a WordPress MU-powered blogging network, using a real, working blog network as an example, so that you can follow the creation process step-by-step. Your blogging network will be complete with professional features such as friends lists, status feeds, groups, forums, photo galleries, and more, to build your own WordPress.com – a place where users can quickly come and create a blog for themselves.

The book is written by Lesley A. Harrison:

Lesley Harrison has more than ten years of experience working in the world of IT. She has served as a web developer for various local organizations, a systems administrator for a multinational IT outsourcing company, and later a database administrator for a British utility company. Today, Lesley runs her own video gaming site, Myth-Games.com, and works as a freelance web developer. She works with clients all over the world to develop Joomla! and WordPress/WordPress MU web sites.

When I first thumbed through it I was a bit put-off by the style and layout – it felt like it might be one of those “books for stupid people”. Each short piece is wrapped in the same set of three headings:

• A Title,
• the main content called “Time for action“,
• and a short review headed “What just happened?“.

After a couple of these you also get:

• a “Pop Quiz” with some fairly simple questions,
• and something entitled “Have a go hero” that gives the reader some guidance to exploring the subject further.

In one way, I’m somewhat confused by this book; the styling and layout feels, to me at least, rather condescending and childish, and yet the actual breadth and depth of content is really very good. You can get a feel for the style in this short excerpt from chapter 7.

Over 12 chapters the author leads the reader from a brief overview of WordPress MU itself and some discussion about the choices you will need to make with regards to hosting etc. through installation of the basic system, installing and customising themes, user management, security, adding features through plugins and extensions, getting money from your site, and finishes off with some optimisation and troubleshooting advice.

There is a huge amount of information in this book. The shear quantity of extensions selected, described, setup and configured makes this well worth the money, just for the time it would take to find them yourself. Lesley uses a fictitious site for Vampire Slayers as the theme and builds a highly functional and comprehensive WordPress MU installation that delivers not just a blog network but also tightly integrated forums and social networking features. It’s obvious she knows her stuff and there are some real nuggets in the book that I wasn’t familiar with myself. There are plenty of screenshots showing what needs clicking and configuring and lots of code snippets where the editing of various WordPress php files is required.

As well as the breadth of information, it’s surprising just how much detail there is in between the covers of WordPress MU 2.8 Beginner’s Guide too. I wouldn’t think of a “Beginner’s” book covering things like Apache’s mod_rewrite and writing your own rewrite rules in .htaccess for example. On the flip-side there were one or two items that felt like they had finished half way, leaving the reader to go and do their own research. So again I question the title and styling of the book against the kind of reader I would expect that would want to buy and use it.

It’s a quick book to read, and is fast-paced which I like. There is minimal waffle or superfluous language – something I’ve noticed with other Packt books in the past too. Perhaps this is part of their editorial design? It certainly helps if it is “by design”. I’ve other technology books that are a real chore to read, requiring the reader to fish the information out of a vast sea of irrelevant language. You can easily read the whole book through in a few hours. It then becomes a great reference device (another benefit of succinctness) when you start to build your MU blog network.

To summarise then, I thought this book has great content, lots of information, good detail in most places and does what it set out to do with regards to the quote at the top of the page. In other ways I found the book a paradox; I thought the layout and style was too infantile for the subject matter and I think the title really doesn’t do the book justice. The saving grace is that these shortcomings don’t really get in the way of the content.

Had I picked up this book and thumbed through it in a bookshop I’m not sure I’d have bought it. By dropping the “Beginner’s Guide” from the cover and making the style a little more adult I probably would have. Of course in this case, Packt sent the book to me so I didn’t have to make that choice and my “job” was to read it and comment. It’s a good book. I enjoyed it, and it has really good content, but I’m not sure it’s being targeted at the right potential buyer. In this case, don’t be put off by the cover.

[Please Note: If you use the links from here to Packt's website and decide to buy any book from their site, we will get a small commission that we can use towards the upkeep of our servers etc.]

If you recall I changed the look of this site last week after building my first WordPress theme.

A passer by called Kirrus suggested I submit it to the WordPress Theme Directory. Which I thought was a cracking idea and one that hadn’t even crossed my mind. I sent it in, a few days later I got an email suggesting I made a couple of minor alterations:

• Add a Feed Autodiscovery to the header (good idea and something I wasn’t actually familiar with)
• Add some “default” widgets to the sidebar so on a blank WP instance you get to see some widgets in the sidebar.

So I did that this morning and submitted version 1.2. Only a few hours later I got a mail saying it had been accepted and is now in the WordPress Theme Directory!

Yippee!!!

I guess, I should ask that if you use the Theme Directory at all, it would be great if you could vote but that’s your choice.

I spend quite a bit of my time doing work for clients on Joomla! including building clean templates from a graphic designer’s images. But I haven’t needed to build a template (theme) for WordPress before which felt like I’d been missing out on or something.

So, here is my first – from scratch – WordPress theme. I’ve called it “Open Sourcerer”. I hope you like it and it works in your browser; please do tell me if it doesn’t although any IE6 users will have to put up with a fixed width layout because I really can’t be arsed to hack around that oh-so-crappy browser when I’m not being paid. Another great “feature” of IE 6 & 7 from my tests is that apparently Microshit are unable to make the text cursor (I-beam) adapt to the environment it finds itself in, so consequently it is very hard to see it against this dark brown background colour. Honestly, is it really so bloody hard to get right? Firefox seems to manage it fine, as does Midori, a “lightweight” Webkit based browser. So if you are reading this with IE and wonder where your cursor has gone, go and get a proper browser for pete’s sake. Anyway, enough of trying to pander to bad commercial software.

This theme is a flexible-width layout from 800-1200px wide which should be fine for most users. The sidebar with the widgets is fixed at 215px currently. If there are any WordPress gurus out there I’d appreciate any feedback on what’s missing or important from this theme. Comparing “Open Sourcerer” to the Default theme there are quite a few other php files in there which I saw no need for. Perhaps overriding the defaults is only necessary if you have a specific kind of layout?

After reading a bit and getting nowhere regarding how to create a WordPress theme from scratch, I came across this gem of a how-to. It’s concise, clear, straightforward and simple. That suited me fine and got me started; thank you Sam Parkinson for sharing your knowledge with us.

I really like dark backgrounds for blogs. The inspiration for this one started by stumbling across this Dark Smoke theme quite by accident and then thinking about the colours of the “New Wave” and “Dust” themes for Gnome that are supplied in Ubuntu 9.04 (Jaunty Jackalope). Here is my desktop using the Dust theme (yes I know I shouldn’t have all those files lying around!).

So, what you see here is a fairly simple 2 column theme, that is flexible in width between 800 and 1200px. The lovely dark brown [almost black] background colour is the same as used in the Dark Smoke theme mentioned above. The other browns are simply lighter shades of the same I achieved in Gcolor2 by just shifting the brightness value. The red is The Open Learning Centre‘s logo colour (#D40000) and the main text colour is taken straight from the Gnome windows and panels in a default Ubuntu desktop using the Dust theme. As for typefaces, if you have the free and open Liberation fonts installed, which I strongly recommend, that will be the font-type rendered. Alternatives are (in order) Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;

The graphic at the top is a section cut from one of the fantastic Hubble telescope images that are freely available. This one in fact.

One aspect of template creation and maintenance I am very keen on is the separation of stylesheets by function. In the main style.css file in my theme, you won’t find much actual styling other than some global resets. What you will see however is this:

/* Make it easy to alter stuff... */
@import url("css/layout.css");
@import url("css/header.css");
@import url("css/menu.css");
@import url("css/content.css");
@import url("css/sidebar.css");
@import url("css/footer.css");
@import url("css/wordpress.css");
@import url("css/tweeks.css");

Hopefully the names of the stylesheets are enough to identify what styling they contain. To my mind this makes it so much easier to navigate when you want to make a change as opposed to trawling through one very long and usually randomly ordered stylesheet.

You can download the theme from here and can modify, hack and/or edit as you wish. It is released under the GPLv3 License.

Update: I made a few small changes to the theme in the vain hope that it may be acceptable for the WordPress.org Theme Directory. Thanks Kirrus for making the suggestion. It was a good idea and made me test my theme more thoroughly too!

Update 2: It worked. This theme has been accepted and is now being hosted on the Theme Directory. I wrote a short piece about that here.

As everyone else seems to say:

Follow me on Twitter

Once I get some time I will find a plugin for WordPress (any good recommendations anyone?) so you can see what me and my followers are up to in the minutiae of our daily endeavours.

I found Gwibber to be very useful, but it has stopped working for the last few days I think because of this bug. Hopefully it will start working again after an update or two…

I was looking about on-line the other day just following my (rather large) nose around the ‘Anthony Baggett’s theme being used by Number 10 Downing Street’ story. And I came across something I don’t really understand. Perhaps others might be able to shed some light on what might be going on here?

Let’s start with the background: Number 10′s Website, is using a look and feel derived from an original theme by Anthony called NetWorker. The way we know this is by the header that was left in the main stylesheet and almost every other file from Anthony’s original package being left in tact on the server.

During my wanderings around the internet I came upon this page: https://secure.mysociety.org/cvstrac/chngview?cn=12360 which shows a list of files that have been updated or changed in some way on a developer’s version control system called CVS. The owner of this system is a group called MySociety.org.

According to their website, MySociety are a non-profit charity and who look to have built some pretty interesting sites; many around freedom of information and enabling better access to Government. They were responsible for creating the Petitions System for Number 10 which looks to have been written as a custom application using at least Perl and PHP.

Here is a screenshot of the page showing the date of the commit (04/08/2008) and the name of the committer (matthew) and a quite long list of files that have been added, removed or altered as part of this commit.

For those who are not familiar, this kind of tool is used by developers to manage software projects. You can literally see each change made to your project, by time and by developer so when something gets fixed (or gets subsequently broken again) you can go back in time and recover your project to the same state prior to a particular commit.

I would like to draw your attention toward the bottom of the page in the screenshot. There you can see a few stylesheet files being removed and two new ones being added. One line in particular caught my attention:

“mysociety/pet/web/no10_css/style.css added-> 1.1“

If you click on the revision number (1.1 in this case) to view the contents of the file¹ you will see that the it has the same header as that of the main Number 10 Downing Street file.

I used the Meld comparison tool as I did before to compare it with Anthony’s original², and this is another derivative work of Anthony’s original style.css file. And I compared this one with the stylesheet used for the main Number 10 website³ they are very, very similar indeed.

If you visit the Prime Minister’s petition site note the similar look and feel to the main 10 Downing Street pages. Now take a look at the stylesheet for this site: http://petitions.number10.gov.uk/no10_css/style.css.

This looks to me like two separate websites, developed by two different companies, but both using the same derived work. Anyone care to elucidate?

1. My Society’s stylesheet
2. Anthony’s original stylesheet
3. No. 10′s heavily modified stylesheet

~/Desktop/dev_area/networker-10$ tree -phDC
.
|-- [-rw-r--r-- 24K  Jun 21 2007] How To Post Images In This Theme.doc
|-- [-rw-r--r-- 1.0K Jul 11 2007] archive.php
|-- [-rw-r--r-- 397  Aug 17 2007] archives.php
|-- [-rw-r--r-- 4.0K Jul 8  2007] comments.php
|-- [-rw-r--r-- 147  Jul 11 2007] footer.php
|-- [-rw-r--r-- 80   Jun 5  2007] functions.php
|-- [-rw-r--r-- 1.7K Jul 12 2007] header.php
|-- [-rw-r--r-- 267  Jul 12 2007] ie6.css
|-- [drwxr-xr-x 232  Aug 17 2007] images
|   |-- [-rw-r--r-- 88K  Jul 12 2007] Thumbs.db
|   |-- [-rw-r--r-- 2.0K Jul 12 2007] ad_space.gif
|   |-- [-rw-r--r-- 217  Jun 18 2007] bullet.gif
|   |-- [-rw-r--r-- 398  Jun 22 2007] nav_hover.gif
|   |-- [-rw-r--r-- 1.3K Jun 6  2007] sub_rss.gif
|   `-- [-rw-r--r-- 4.3K Jul 12 2007] wp.gif
|-- [-rw-r--r-- 1.1K Jul 9  2007] index.php
|-- [-rw-r--r-- 18K  Jun 13 2007] license.rtf
|-- [-rw-r--r-- 700  Jul 11 2007] page.php
|-- [-rw-r--r-- 60K  Jun 13 2007] screenshot.png
|-- [-rw-r--r-- 946  May 10 2007] search.php
|-- [-rw-r--r-- 257  May 10 2007] searchform.php
|-- [-rw-r--r-- 2.5K Jul 12 2007] sidebar.php
|-- [-rw-r--r-- 1.3K Jul 11 2007] single.php
|-- [-rw-r--r-- 2.4K Feb 2  2007] sitemap.php
`-- [-rw-r--r-- 9.6K Jul 12 2007] style.css

I thought I would try to find out just how much of Anthony’s theme is still there. Not being much of a hacker myself, all I have done is simply added each of the file names above to a URL that points to the location of the theme directory in the Firefox navigation bar. So the whole URL in the bar looks like this:  http://www.number10.gov.uk/wp-content/themes/networker-10/filename-to-look-for.

If you try and open a non-existent file, you get a “404″ not found message as one would expect. Anything else means the file is present. The way php works however makes it very hard to tell what the contents of the .php files are.

Guess what? There is an awful lot of Anthony’s content still on Number 10′s website. Here’s what I found when comparing the response I got from Number 10 to the original files in the theme package:

• How To Post Images In This Theme.doc:
  Files are identical and there is a really interesting comment at the bottom of this file that is just so ironic: “to give credit where credit is due, I borrowed this idea from Chris Pearson who is the author of the Cutline theme.“
• archive.php:
  File exists and returns a blank page.
• archives.php:
  File isn’t present, returns 404.
• comments.php:
  File present and returns exactly the same response text as is written in the original file: “Please do not load this page directly. Thanks!”
• footer.php:
  File present and returns a blank page.
• functions.php:
  File present and returns a blank page.
• header.php:
  File present, returns a blank page.
• ie6.css:
  File present, has been modified greatly and Anthony’s header has been removed! But it does contain an identical first line of css styling: #content, #sidebar { overflow: hidden; }. Note the spacing and line breaks etc
• /images
  • Thumbs.db:
    Files are identical.
  • ad_space.gif:
    Files are identical.
  • bullet.gif:
    Files are identical.
  • nav_hover.gif:
    Files are identical.
  • sub_rss.gif:
    Files are identical.
  • wp.gif:
    Files are identical.
• index.php:
  File present, and returns a blank page.
• license.rtf:
  File is present and the files are identical. Yet, the copyright notice of the site states “Crown Copyright! so which applies here?
• page.php:
  File present and returns a blank page.
• screenshot.png:
  This one is really funny… files are identical.
• search.php:
  Not present, returns 404.
• searchform.php:
  Not present, returns 404.
• sidebar.php:
  File present and returns “Newsletter. Sign up to our newsletter to keep updated with the latest information from Number 10, Click here to subscribe”. The HTML source retains comments from the original.
• single.php:
  File present and returns blank page.
• sitemap.php:
  File present and returns XHTML header information the same as in the original.
• style.css:
  File present, as we know already.

So, out of 24 files in the original theme package, only three files have been removed. If you look here in the comments from my post of yesterday, you can read what Dave Smith of NMM said:

1. The only file that was drawn upon from Ant’s theme was the css file.

Now clearly some of the files above will be pre-requisites for any WordPress theme (like index.php for example) but 21 out of 24?.

I’m sure I can smell something quite smelly around here.

The story so far, for any new readers, can be found here, here and here. And do follow the links in those posts to the various other sources to get a broader picture.

(David, if I am wrong anywhere, I assume you will let me know…)

What concerns me greatly about this whole fiasco is that New Media Maze are still (as I write this at least) basically trying to act as though they’ve done nothing really wrong and everything is fine. I think it isn’t.

David’s post seems to be an attempt to convince the reader that because they changed lots of things from the original template, their requirement to appropriately attribute the original work is negligible and the lines they forgot to remove left in the stylesheet are sufficient.

His post also, to me at least,  indicates a rather poor appreciation of what Open Source, “The Commons” and the new collaborative world in which we all live really mean.

First then, the WordPress theme.

The simple fact is this: the Number 10 website which New Media Maze claim to have designed is based on original work by somebody else. How much of the original work remains in the design is really not important, although almost all of the original stylesheet is still present within the gargantuan ~4000 lines of the new site’s file. (Incidentally, who on earth designed a stylesheet like that? I don’t recall ever seeing a 65kb stylesheet before. Maintenance and alterations are going to be fun…). And we also saw that the index.php file was from the original source as they had left the comment in it.

Irrespective of the legal position New Media Maze believe themselves to be in, the right (as in decent, proper, common) practice in these circumstances is to attribute the work in a suitable manner. Such as a simple line somewhere on the site saying something like: “This website is based on an original idea by…”.

I’m sure you all get the idea. And being a “Full Service New Media Agency” I’m sure NMM could come up with something suitably profound.

Most people on the Internet have no idea what a CSS is, how to find or read one, and why should they to be frank? There was a visible copyright notice in the original theme. It has been removed.

The continuation of this farce, by NMM is not helping their position, or their client’s, one little bit. To be honest, by continuing to bleat on about how little of the original work was used rather than just doing the right thing, makes them look like [insert your prefered derogatory phrase here]. My personal choice would be “a bunch of cowboys”.

On a secondary, but related note, an impression I get from reading David’s statement makes me wonder if Downing Street are actually running WordPress or are in fact running some uberpress code that has been made ultra-secure and “top secret”. If I am wrong about this please let me know, it is just an assumption on my behalf. What version of WP are they running? We can’t tell as they took out the meta-tag.

If they have hacked the code to make it more secure, I hope that those modifications have been provided back to the WordPress community so everyone gets the benefit. If they haven’t, Downing Street are not running WordPress, but a fork. They are now stuck with a version which will get harder and harder to maintain, and will ultimately be less secure than the publicly developed OSS code that has the world’s eyes watching and improving it every day…. I hope I am wrong and the backend is a regular WordPress release but if it isn’t, then Downing Street really have been sold a pup and are not using Open Source code at all.

The Number 10 website fiasco just keeps going.

New Media Maze, that “Full Service New Media Agency”, look to have really screwed up. Not only have they nicked a free WordPress template and removed the attribution and removed the license, but it seems the site itself is actually full of bugs and errors too.

Dizzy Thinks has found some lovely errors and a strange chap called “Adam Test”… ROTFL.

And when you’ve finished rolling around on the floor laughing take a look at this research on The Rouseabout to see what a little more digging throws up: (I’ll give you a clue: 404s).

Honestly, if this is what we get for £100,000 of taxpayer’s money from New Media Maze then, quite frankly, I’m glad I hadn’t heard of them before.

How much are the Gov. going to spend on our ID card database? The one that nobody wants. Do you trust them to get it right? Nahhh.

And Glyn Moody discovered a little known government project to build a “massive central silo for all UK communications data…”.

It’s at times like these that I fall on my virtual knees and bless the cyber-gods that ensure every single major UK government project is a complete and utter failure, so this doesn’t stand a snowball’s chance in hell of ever working properly. Phew.

PLEASE!!!! Someone take these huge IT projects out of the Government’s hands! They are so crap at it our whole lives will end up on Facebook if we aren’t careful… Oh, most already are.

All we need now is for Microshaft to come rolling along spouting off about how much better the site would have been if they’d spent the money on Blog Server 2008 running on Windoors 2010 with Sequal Server 2012… or whatever crap it is they are pushing this week.

Here’s the background:

• No. 10 Are running WordPress¹
• The theme (or template) is based on one called NetWorker²
• The attribution and copyright notice that is in the original footer has been removed
• The site claims to be Crown Copyright and makes no reference to the CC-by-sa license used in the original template

I am a bit confused here. Why would a web design shop (or “Full Service New Media Agency” as they call themselves), who were apparently paid the best part of £100k for this job³, use somebody else’s template as the basis for their design?

• You might think it would be because using a pre-made template would save you loads of tricky coding and playing around with CSS trying to get your site to look the same in IE6, IE7, Firefox, Safari and Opera [A task I am quite familiar with myself].
• You might also think that using a pre-made template would allow you to make minor modifications, add some different images and give you something that looks really different.
• Of course it might be simply that you don’t have time to create a new theme from scratch and using an “off-the-shelf” template will mean you can get the site up and running much faster.
• Or another possibility could be that you like ripping off your customers for as much as possible and using a free (or even a bought) template will mean your costs are minimal.

All, some, or none of the above could be reasons to use an existing template as a basis for your new design.

So how much new coding would be needed making the changes to an existing template to suit your new design? 10%, 20%, maybe even 50% and it would still be worth while…

Get this: the revised stylesheet from Anthony Baggett’s template is more than 6 times the original’s length and size! And that isn’t all made up of whitespace either…

The original stylesheet⁴ is 612 lines in length and is 9234 bytes in size (9KB).

The modified stylesheet⁵ is 3826 lines long and weighs in at a frankly astonishing 63724 bytes (63KB)!

You can obviously download the two stylesheets from their websites directly (I recommend using a plugin for Firefox called Web Developer) or to make things easier, I have made them available at the bottom of this page.

Looking through the new file, the amount of duplication and repetition of styling of the same, or very similar elements, is quite odd. It certainly isn’t the way I would construct a theme. Why duplicate the same styling over, and over, and over again when you could craft the logic so that each of these elements have a commonality that could then be controlled with a much smaller stylesheet?

Here are a few screenshots showing some of the differences between the two files. In the brilliant Open Source comparison application Meld I’m using here, the original stylesheet is shown in the left pane and the modified one is on the right. The first image shows the very top of both files with Anthony’s header still in tact. The second and third are just a couple of fairly random points where the new file contains a great deal of repetition as I am walking down through the files. The final image shows the bottom of both files (note the line numbers!).

One thing that is clear from using a tool like Meld is that these two files are definitely related. The way the application displays the differences, it is clear where the files are the same and where they differ. The larger file is certainly a derivative work of Anthony’s original.

Another aspect I found rather funny in this investigation was the method of version control for this huge stylesheet. Both stylesheets have the same version number and there doesn’t appear to have been any tool used to update the header as would be usual. How on earth does a business that develops a ~4000 line stylesheet manage to do that without using some sort of versioning system?

I have helped businesses use and modify pre-made templates for Joomla!, and to be honest if you are making changes of any significance to these templates, it is almost always easier and quicker and cheaper to start from scratch. For small mods and changes pre-bought templates can be really good value (I mean $50 is fairly average), but getting your head around someone else’s code is never easy and takes considerable time. For major alterations it just doesn’t make financial sense.

Now, making additions and changes just to the stylesheet of more than 6 times the original is not good business sense in my opinion. How much more work have they done to the PHP code that we can’t see? We know they have modified at least index.php (by removing the WordPress statistic generator meta tag) and footer.php (by removing Anthony’s copyright notice). But if they have made SO MANY changes and additions to the stylesheet, there surely must be a good deal of altered php code, or additions, in the core php files too? Surely, it would have been easier to make a new template from scratch in this instance?

This leads on to the other question that might be worth digging into a bit more; GPL violations:

“If” the developers have modified the WordPress engine, as is being suggested as a possibility here, and then sold it to the Government, in my humble understanding that means they have distributed their modifications. That means those modifications must also be licensed under the GPL. I had a quick look on New Media Maze’s web site and couldn’t find an area for software downloads or mention of the GPL. That doesn’t say anything to be honest and there might be nothing to this, but it would be interesting to find out a bit more… Is there a real WordPress guru who can look at the “footprint” of the XHTML the site generates and tell if it is different? Or are there any other ways to tell if it has been modified?

Anyway, what a wheez this all is for us bloggers: It just isn’t Gordon’s year is it…

1. www.number10.gov.uk/
2. NetWorker Theme
3. £100k for WordPress site
4. Anthony’s original stylesheet
5. No. 10′s heavily modified stylesheet