The purpose of this lunch break is to clear the air about some issues and let you know what’s going on with this blog. Mainly, I want to address several accusations made against me. I read those accusations before and have been holding my tongue for a long time, until now.

WordPress.com didn’t pay Small Potato!

Despite the popular belief, WordPress.com did not pay me for the Neo-Sapien theme that it recently added to its theme collection. And no, I didn’t cave into any pressure from Matt Mullenweg to switch the Creative Commons themes to GPL. Using Neo-Sapien as one of the themes for WordPress.com was not a bribe for me to switch the rest of my themes to GPL. Earlier, I mentioned on this blog that I had a conversation with Matt, in which I explained why WPDesigner themes were under CC license. He understood my reason and that was the end of that. If anything at all, I would say the recent wave of sponsored themes had an effect on the decision to make the switch to GPL.

I’m not that nice.

I stopped freelancing because of several reasons, none of which includes the accusation that I’m getting paid handsomely from WP.com. Although I wish, I was getting paid from WP.com; that would make my journey to a million dollars much easier.

Furthermore, about freelancing, I usually respond with this rejection, “Sorry, I’m not for hire.” I admit that’s pretty blunt, but that’s just me and I’m not going to sugar-coat a NO to your job offer.

Thanks. That’s really nice of you, but it’s okay.

WPDesigner.com has been online for almost a year now and I’ve never accepted any type of donation, whether it’s PayPal or Amazon Wish List. I just feel awkward accepting donations, not that the donations were too small for me to care.

Designing WordPress themes is a hobby. I’m just glad that what I do, can help you at the same time.

Thank you for supporting WPDesigner and its themes.

Upcoming theme release

I haven’t released a theme for about three months. It’s finally time to do it. The upcoming theme is a three-to-four-column hybrid theme, with at least four widget-ready sidebars. It’s called, Greed, the first of the Seven Deadly Sins theme series. So far in my WordPress theme design experience, one funny thing stood out to me. Design-wise, some bloggers are greedy about sidebars. So if you want more, I’ll give you more sidebars than you can handle.

And if you’ve voted for WPDesigner, you will get to play with Greed before the public release.

As for the development of Supreme, I have to put it on hold and test some Supreme’s design features with themes like Greed. Once I’m comfortable with duplicating those features for Supreme, I’ll start working on Supreme again.

Upcoming tutorial

The upcoming tutorial is a more advanced version of my previous tutorial series. Unlike the previous tutorial series, it will be downloadable as one package so you’ll get to move through all the lessons without having to click on any link. And unlike the last tutorial series, it will based on a theme with multiple sidebars.

For the rest of the Creative Commons license themes

I can’t switch all of them to GPL yet because some of them use photos and images that weren’t released under GPL. I need to take care of that before switching. At first, I wanted to contact the authors of all those images and photos that were freely available for me to use; I wanted to ask them for permission to release under GPL. However, I don’t remember where every photo was from. Also, the NDesign Studio icons that were used for some of the themes were released under CC. It’s awkward for me to ask the author of those icons (Nick) to make an exception for my themes because I don’t want to put him in a tough position.

What I will do is go back and replace some of those photos and images with blank-banners and then switch those themes to GPL. As for themes that depend on the mini-icons, I haven’t decided whether to remove the icons or leave those themes under CC.