Oh dear. Last week I appear to have scared a lot of people :(
I guess a modicum of scaring is a good thing as it makes people aware of the dangers and traps that it is easy to fall into. I was perhaps a little bit hyperbolic when I said “anywhere else.” I should have said “Why you should never search for free WordPress Themes in Google or Any Other Search Engine.”
However, I hope that my post hasn’t had everyone jumping ship to Drupal as tweets like this would have you:
Don’t leave! I promise that you can find lots of lovely, high quality, WordPress 3.0 compliant themes that you can use for your/your client’s/your dog’s WordPress website. As many people have pointed out, the problem isn’t with free WordPress themes, per se. The problem is with themes being used to propagate spammy links, link injections, for malware or whatever else someone who has too much time on their hands can come up with. This problem is compounded by the fact that most of the sites that rank in search engines for the words “free WordPress themes” contain this type of code.
As Mark at Weblog Tools Collection points out there are two possible solutions.
- WordPress automatically checks themes for code like this when they are installed and warns the user
- Google does a better job of filtering out sites like this
I would love it if Google could do better. I did email their press office but as yet have received no response :( I also bugged Matt Cutts on twitter but no luck there either (Matt does say he is having digital downtime though so he may not have received it).
Either way, it would be great to find out what Google’s position on all of this is. Do any of you work for Google? I’d love to hear from you!
In the meantime, I thought it was time for something positive. So instead of telling you where you shouldn’t be looking for your themes, I thought I would write something about where you should (outside the WordPress directory that is).
As someone who teaches WordPress (and who loves to teach WordPress!) I know how important it is to give people starting out the right advice. I’m going to try to do that here.
But first….. what does “free” mean anyway?
In the comments of my last post, Caspar asked what you should expect when you get something free. It’s a good question, but what do we mean when we say “free”?
Many people are now releasing their themes under the GPL, with some sites still releasing themes under a Creative Commons license.
1. GPL
Here’s a lovely quote from the GPL:
“When we speak of free software, we are referring to freedom, not price.”
I’m sure that everyone who searches for free WordPress themes is thinking of price, but this definition of freedom is important as well. Under the terms of the GPL users may copy, distribute and modify GPL released software.
The great GPL debate pretty much came to a close when, in 2009, Matt Mullenweg announced that the Software Freedom Law Center had ruled that themes are derivatives of WordPress and, due to the viral nature of the GPL, must be licensed under the GPL as well.
Note: This doesn’t apply to CSS and Images, which is interesting when we think about Child Themes which are often, after all, just CSS. Also, we’ve seen the emergence of split licenses which is what sort of resolved last year‘s rather unpleasant Thesis – WordPress wars.
Anyway, I’m not going to go into the history of it, instead you should read WPCandy’s timeline which provides a great potted history of GPL and WordPress.
What I’m going to do is get to the point… (yes, I know, about time)
One of the themes I downloaded last week was an old version of Michael Oeser’s Branford Magazine theme which had base64 code added to the footer of the theme. While it is legal for someone else to edit the code the GPL states this:
5. Conveying Modified Source Versions.
You may convey a work based on the Program, or the modifications to produce it from the Program, in the form of source code under the terms of section 4, provided that you also meet all of these conditions:
a) The work must carry prominent notices stating that you modified it, and giving a relevant date.
Here’s the info about the GPL in the CSS file from the modified version:
I see neither dates nor information about any modifications (except for some childish scrawling done by some moron).
The same was true of the rip-off of Brian Gardner’s old Dropshadow theme.
These themes are being redistributed without sticking to the terms of the GPL.
2. Creative Commons
Another common feature of these types of sites with free WordPress themes is that they release themes under a Creative Commons License.
However, any derivative work of any GPL licensed work carries with it the GPL license. It’s like catching a cold and passing it on to all your friends – only much nicer!
Let me state, for the record, that (despite my parents’ best attempts to get me to go to Law School) I am not a lawyer. But, having spent lots of time reading and researching the GPL and WordPress, I believe that you are within your rights to remove and edit anything from the template files (i.e. anything followed by .php). I have been put right by Ryan and Chip in my comments :)
The theme developer is not within their rights to distribute a theme without a GPL licence – however, I have been told that you are not within your rights to change a Theme which has been incorrectly licensed. Does that make sense?
The theme developer could release the CSS as Creative Commons and the template files under GPL to get around this issue. However, none of the sites that I looked at were doing that.
ANYWAY, after many divergences this leads me to the main point of this article. Where can you get free WordPress themes?
Unlike many theme repositories, I’m going to go all out and define my terms (which is why I did all of that blah)
- Free: To be free it must have no cost attached to it and the user must have the freedom to distribute and modify all of it. So:
- Cost $0000
- Be released 100% under GPL
- WordPress: Run on WordPress
- Theme: errrmmm… be a theme…
I guess “free” was the only one that really mattered there
Just one more thing…
I am going to put together a clickable, printable, shareable, downloadable, lickable, edible, infographic/cheat sheet mash-up thingy containing links and URLs of sites where you can download free and low-cost WordPress themes. This will hopefully be useful to any of you beginners or people with clients who are .
If you have any sites that you would like to recommend let me know either here or at my twitter account. I’ll check out the site and if it’s all good I’ll include it.
In general these sites have fewer themes than you find in the huge repositories but if it is quality that you want, instead of garbage code, they are definitely a good place to start.
A great starting point for your Theme Hunt is Weblog Tools Collection. The guys there post daily with the latest theme releases. And they aren’t lax about checking themes for suspicious code, as this page shows. If you want to keep up to date with what’s going on in the world of themes – both in and out of the WordPress directory – it’s a great place to start.
You could also check out their post on finding free WordPress themes, which has some great advice.
WooThemes
WooThemes has been producing great quality WordPress themes for a number of years. However, you don’t have to join their WooTHemes WordPress Theme Club to reap the benefits of their work. They’ve released a number of free themes that can be downloaded directly from their website.
Number of free WordPress Themes: 10
Themelab
ThemeLab is run by Leland Fiegel who runs it one-handed and still has time to produce a large collection of free WordPress Themes. I reviewed his Green Tea theme recently and it’s been one of those themes that really stuck in my head.
Number of free WordPress Themes: 118
Dynamic WP
Dynamic WP are a group of developers based in Indonesia who have produced some really striking WordPress themes. Their latest offering is a super-charged version of TwentyTen, called TwentyEleven. These guys have got some great free themes in their portfolio and it’s definitely worth taking a look.
Number of free WordPress Themes: 34
Graph Paper Press
If you want somewhere to get some of the most stylish photoblogging and vlogging themes then the first place you should look is Graph Paper Press. I’m sure I’ve said before that I’m a fangirl, but I probably can’t say that quite enough. Among their portfolio they have a number of free themes which are as good as any commercial ones.
Number of free WordPress Themes: 9
WPShower
WP Shower… *drool.* They make some really beautiful minimalist WordPress themes – all for free! They are a way for you to clean your blog (geddit?) The portfolio at WP Shower is small but this is the type of place where you get quality over quantity. It’s a must-see for any free WordPress theme hunters.
Number of free WordPress Themes: 7
Smashing Magazine
If you’re not familiar with Smashing Magazine, where have you been? It’s one of my favorite places for design news, tips and releases. They regularly commission guest designers to produce beautiful, top quality WordPress themes.
Number of free WordPress Themes: 24
Theme Hybrid
Theme Hybrid is the home of the Hybrid and Prototype WordPress themes, and all of their lovely children. Parent Themes (or theme frameworks) are great to use, especially if you are learning about theme development. You can build your own CSS files to to flex your creative muscles.
Number of free WordPress Themes: 17
ThemeShaper
ThemeShaper is another site that has a comprehensive theme framework as well as a playground full of child themes. I often builder sites on top of Thematic – it’s easy to use and to customize and there are loads of great child themes out there.
Number of free WordPress Themes: 20 child themes + 1 Thematic
Templatic
Templatic only just made it on to this list, after announcing on 1st January 2011 that they were going GPL. This is great news for the WordPress community. Only launched in 2008, they have a portfolio packed full of themes with some great free ones that anyone can download.
Number of free WordPress Themes: 9
There were quite a lot of free sites out there that looked pretty good, and had nice themes, but that had released their themes under Creative Commons, rather than GPL. Since my criteria was to include themes which are free from cost and free to distribute I thought that I had better not include them.
There are also loads of small design companies which release the occasional free theme. You should be able to pick up on them by checking out Weblog Tools Collection.
But what about Theme Forest?
A lot of people mentioned Theme Forest as a good (not free, but cheap) place to get themes. Although their themes aren’t 100% GPL (the PHP is, the rest of it isn’t) I thought it worth looking at Theme Forest as there were so many questions.
I contacted Envato (who own Theme Forest – and also the lovely NetTuts!) and asked them about their submission policy. Mark, who got back to me, was very helpful. Here’s what he said in relation to base64 and other codes:
While we do allow it [base64] for non-malicious purposes, we don’t allow any sort of malware or link hiding within themes. We do a strict manual review of each file that comes in, and if for some reason a file we’re to slip through the cracks with something like your article details, once we’ve been made aware of it, we’d immediately remove the item and warn the author. If we catch an author repeating the issue after being warned it could result in a disablement of their account.
We take the quality of our themes very seriously and work vigorously to ensure our themes meet the highest standard. While one may accept small issues like these within free themes, it would be unacceptable to sell a file that was abusing our users in malicious ways.
So there you go, that’s Theme Forest’s view on it. As I said in my previous article – base64 may not be hiding malicious/spammy code. A thorough review process such as the one at Theme Forest then you can mitigate against this sort of activity. The minimal cost involved in these themes must be worth the piece of mind. But remember! You can distribute the PHP under the terms of the GPL but not the rest of the theme!
Have I missed anything? Let me know in the comments and I’ll update the post :)
Your image above of creative commons code is misleading as you imply that someone has the rights to ignore the creative commons license and treat it as if it is GPL. Even if something is required to be GPL, that doesn’t necessarily make it so. By not obeying a creative commons license you are still violating that license regardless of whether the copyright holder of that work is also violating the GPL.
I’m sure if you dug deep enough you would find some malicious code in free Drupal templates as well.
I think your previous article was correct in highlighting the dangers of some free templates especially if you are a newbie to WordPress
Another great and informative piece on WordPress Themes Siobhan – keep it up, you’re on a roll!
WPMU is my fave WP blog :-)
Thanks
Mark
Thanks for your comments everyone :)
@ryan – as far as I am aware, because of the nature of the GPL WordPress themes automatically carry with them the GPL licence. The Software Freedom Law Center say the following:
“These snippets of HTML interspersed with PHP throughout the theme PHP files together form a work whose form is highly dependent on the PHP and thus derivative of it.
In conclusion, the WordPress themes supplied contain elements that are derivative of WordPress’s copyrighted code. These themes, being collections of distinct works (images, CSS files, PHP files), need not be GPL-licensed as a whole. Rather, the PHP files are subject to the requirements of the GPL while the images and CSS are not. Third-party developers of such themes may apply restrictive copyrights to these elements if they wish.”
So while a Creative Commons license could be applied to the CSS and the images, it cannot by applied to the PHP and HTML. Therefore it would be more appropriate for the theme author to put the info about the Creative Commons license info in the CSS file rather than in the PHP file as, under the GPL, the user can change the PHP if they wish.
@Siobhan – Yes, this is the commonly held interpretation. It has been argued to death many times before and various people have differing opinions.
What is not under debate though is what I was talking about in my comment above. The license applied to a theme said to be Creative Commons by the copyright holder will remain Creative Commons until they change it. It does not matter whether that work is required to be GPL or not, that just means they’re in violation of the law, but it still doesn’t make their work GPL until they actually make it so. Two wrongs don’t make a right.
Siobhan:
You’ve just given your readers very bad legal advice. Ryan is correct: a work only carries the license given it by its owner. For a WordPress Theme, that includes all of the work, including the PHP.
My stance on the matter of GPL inheritance is well known, and we don’t need to get into that particular argument here. Nevertheless, even if a Theme is derivative of WordPress, at worst, a developer wouldn’t have the right to distribute a derivative work under a non-GPL license. That means that the work can’t be distributed if it’s not GPL; it does not mean that anyone to whom it has been distributed can change the license at whim.
I would strongly advise that you modify your post, to remove the bit about suggesting to your readers that they modify the license terms of distributed Themes.
Aside from that: another excellent post!
Thanks Ryan and Chip. I have amended my post :) I hope I didn’t give legal advice though. I definitely am not qualified to do that (as made clear!)
Got a question though. Under he terms of the GPL a work that is derivative automatically carries a GPL license. How can it be that someone can make something that is derivative of WordPress and it not automatically carry the GPL? Surely it’s just passed on from WordPress…..
Siobhan:
That’s a mis-reading of the GPL. The GPL merely states that it is the only license under which a distributer has any rights by which to distribute a GPL-licensed work (or its derivative).
If someone creates a derivative work from WordPress, he is under no obligation to license that work at all. All the GPL states is that, unless he licenses that WordPress-derivative work under GPL, he has no legal right to distribute.
A copyrightable work can only ever be licensed by the copyright holder. In the case of a derivative work, the developer of that derivative work is the copyright holder, and as such has the exclusive to license his work for distribution. Thus, the GPL from one work cannot force itself onto another work – even a derivative work.
If you find a WordPress-derivative work licensed under something other than the GPL, you have discovered not a GPL-licensed work, but rather an illegally distributed work.
Hopefully that make things a bit clearer? :)
Another great post!
Funny you should mention Drupal as I just tried out Drupal 7 and I was floored. Drupal has, for a while, had the content post type and taxonomy features that are only now making their way into WordPress, but it has even gone so far as to integrate these capabilities into the backend and frontend. In other words, you create your content types in the backend and they display in the frontend without having to mess with HTML, CSS, PHP. WPMUDev’s Custompress plugin being my current favorite WordPress plugin, it’s sad to see that Drupal has had that type of capability built into it for a while.
That said, it’s short-sighted for someone to say people should jump ship to Drupal because of issues like link-hiding in many free WordPress themes, as if Drupal is so immune. I just watched a video recently where some Drupal devs clearly stated that Drupal has its vulnerabilities. It’s just a given.
@Chip Bennett, as usual I appreciate your insight. I’ll have to provide an update/modification to my theme releases on my cheesy theme site. :) It always went without mention that the themes are 100% free as in the gospel. I just released the themes under a Creative Commons license for lack of understanding of all the different licenses the themes were being released under, as they were cross-CMS.
I did try to convey their utter free-ness in my About section though. But at least for the WordPress themes I’ll have to add in the tidbit about the PHP being GPL’d. It’s sad when someone wants to release 100% free stuff and has to do an incredible amount of research to do so.
Hi Siobhan
You did scare me… but I’m not jumping to Drupal.
Taken me ages to get into WordPress. I don’t fancy starting again.
Love the twenty ten becoming twenty eleven – very clever.
I think that the new wordpress default theme – twenty ten – looks fantastic.
The reason that I don’t use it is that you don’t get support, which you do with a premium theme.
Thanks for a fantastic list of good looking free themes.
Looks as though you have produced another “must add to favourites” post.
“If you find a WordPress-derivative work licensed under something other than the GPL, you have discovered not a GPL-licensed work, but rather an illegally distributed work.”
So, you are stating that ALL THOSE THOUSANDS of “free” wordpress themes, released entierly under “Creative Commons” (not just the css, but the derivated php code allso) is ILLEGALY distributed work, wright ?
It very much seems like it.
@Cazare Brasov:
No, actually, I’m not saying that. I said derivative work, not Theme. I do not believe that current copyright case law supports the claim that Themes are inherently derivative works of WordPress – though that’s an argument I have no desire to get into here.
That is an excellent way of describing it. I need to log that quote in my memory banks for the next time I need to explain this to someone.
@Chip Thank you so much! You’ve answered half a dozen questions I’ve had in my mind forever!
@Siobhan Thank you for the great follow-up! I couldn’t fit my answer into anything near the size of a comment, so I’ve answered you here: http://glueckpress.com/dev/2011/01/20/free-wordpress-themes/
ThemeForest is really bad for the community. They don’t allow the author to upload a GPL theme. Must be their license.
So they make money from GPL WP, but don’t give anything back.
Shame on them!
Toni Coxe
Great article and advice. I’ve been installing wordpress themes for those projects that are lower in budget or startup sites. The part about ThemeForest is spot on. When I go to purchase one of their themes it shows how many times the theme was purchased. This is a good indicator of how trusted the author is and the quality of their work.
They all have a comment section. It’s a good idea to ask questions directly to the designer of the theme before you purchase. That’s what I tell my clients as well. Take a look at the themes or templates as in our case. Then let me know which one’s you’re interested in so I can provide pro’s and con’s on how it will work for them.
Taking a little time to consult about a project pays off in the long run in a big way! I’d rather sell someone a project for $250 bucks than see them waste $100′s trying to do it themselves.
Most people just get fed up and discouraged as there are many unfinished websites out there!
Take care :)
Snerdey
Thanks for your tips. They are very informative to us developers. Regards