If you didn’t know about microformats

A microformat (sometimes abbreviated as uF is a web-based approach to semantic markup that seeks to re-use existing XHTML and HTML tags to convey metadata and other attributes. This approach allows information intended for end-users (such as contact information, geographic coordinates, calendar events, and the like) to also be automatically processed by software.

-wikipedia

In a bit more simpler meaning, if you have a software which can understand a web page written with microformat, it would be possible for the software to automatically recognize the informations like, contact information, geometric information, bookmarks etc.

If it is still not very clear, what will extra benefit will you get from it, just try operator firefox addon once with Layers theme. The theme uses hatom, hcard, XFN, rel-home, xFolk microformats.

The article by otto helped a lot for this update.

No doubt, I love WordPress.

Whenever I went to wordpress.org, I was always wondering why there is no theme tab under the extend wordpress titled page. Now, this requirement has been fulfilled by the good wordpress guys. The user doesn’t have to go under the subversion details too, just one has to register for a new account on wordpress.org (great if you are already having that) and upload it with a few requirements.

The requirements are:

1. A single zip file, with all of the files themes file included.
2. There must be a style.css file containing:
   1. Name (which must be unique to the directory)
   2. Tags
   3. Version (in the format of x.x or x.x.x and must be unique to the theme)
   4. Align classes: .alignright, .alignleft, .aligncenter (see http://codex.wordpress.org/CSS for more details)
3. The screenshot file name must be screenshot.png, and be a real screenshot of the theme, not a splash screen.
4. Licensing must be GPL compatible.
5. No hidden, paid or sponsored links in the theme. Links back to the author’s site are fine.
6. The theme must be your own original work.
7. Adult/mature themes are not allowed.

That looks fine, ( Well I initially released my first theme under the same license which this site is ).

So now we have a central repository of well reviewed themes on this directory. Cheers for that!

1. GPL
2. Creative Commons Attribution Share Alike License

On freenode #cc channel bringatowel helped me solve some of my confusions about creative commons licensing. So things are quite clear in my mind now.

Creative Commons is working with IIT Bombay to create India jurisdiction-specific licenses from the generic Creative Commons licenses. Porting of the version 2.5 documents is completed.

As written on gnu.org about Creative Commons

This is a copyleft free license that is good for artistic and entertainment works, and educational works. Please don’t use it for software or documentation, since it is incompatible with the GNU GPL and with the GNU FDL.

GPL could also work well, but as the design and theme creation is more towards art I am going to consider Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 2.5 License. The attribution clause of creative commons looks interesting.

Also mentioned on the same page

Creative Commons publishes many licenses which are very different. Therefore, to say that a work “uses a Creative Commons license” is to leave the principal questions about the work’s licensing unanswered. When you see such a statement in a work, please ask the author to highlight the substance of the license choices. And if someone proposes to “use a Creative Commons license” for a certain work, it is vital to ask immediately, “Which one?”

So I am being specific over here. We have an answer to “which one?”

UPDATE :

After the introduction of new wordpress theme directory, i am thinking about changing the license to GPL. Now that looks sensible!

For the JQuery port of the fancy menu effect read this post or this post at meta20.net (aka Smooth Menu for JQuery)

This is my first post to my all-new blog with a fresh theme applied — Layers! I should have started with this blog-cum-portfolio way before but I just wanted to get it into my own style. After diving into the wordpress template tags and theming structure, it was not a big deal to apply my layout on wordpress. Thanks a ton wordpress guys.

As for now, Layers is in it’s developmental version, i’ll soon be uploading it for public release. So wait a few more days!!! I’ll keep on writing….