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I came across a theme the other day called TweetPress, which bears a very obvious resemblance to the Twitter profile design. Let’s compare.

First, here’s a screenshot of the TweetPress theme:

And here’s a screenshot of my Twitter profile.

Not only is it a striking resemblance, it appears the cloudy background image was lifted directly from Twitter’s website, among other things. It’s the default background image set for new profiles.

Update: According to Gabriel Jones, creator of the TweetPress theme, “The [Twitter] API returns the background image, the link colors, everything…” in this comment.

Cloned WordPress themes aren’t exactly a new phenomena though…

Other Clone Themes

This blog post over at WPZOOM with 15 examples of WordPress clone themes shows a few more examples.

Some of the themes are clones of popular news sites, such as ESPN, and the New York Times. A theme review which I did here a while back called Red Carpet could have been considered a clone of People.com

Others are clones of popular social network sites like Digg, Facebook, and of course, Twitter.

Some are free, some are paid. Either way, I don’t like it one bit.

My Take

At best, they are overly inspired. At worst, it’s downright theft. I’m no lawyer, but I’d imagine that taking a custom design of another site would involve some serious copyright issues.

When you’re releasing the theme into the wild, selling it, and profiting off of it, you’ve probably opened a whole new can of worms.

Running Custom Theme, I have received several requests to make clones, replicas, whatever you want to call it, of other sites the potential client is not associated with.

I’m not talking about inspiration, I’m talking about requests to completely copy a site. I have refused every single job like that, and will continue to do so.

A while back, someone actually took my old blog design of Theme Lab, converted it to a Blogger theme (yuck) and released it under some Creative Commons license. This was almost an exact copy, images, styles and all, released without my knowledge or consent. I asked nicely (as in, no internet hounds involved) and the webmaster who released it removed it.

In another incident, someone released a theme (which I reviewed as a Theme Lab Look-alike Theme) which also took some obvious inspiration from Theme Lab, although I don’t believe any images or CSS was directly taken from my site.

Needless to say, in both instances I was pretty upset that it seemed people were taking advantage of my popular site design and using it to get more traffic, promote themselves, and ultimately profit off of my copyrighted designs.

Your Thoughts?

WPTavern had a great discussion titled “Themes that mimic copyrighted design,” started by Hafiz Rahman of WPlover. The consensus? It was generally a bad practice. Whether or not it was legal or not, or enforceable, remained up for debate.

I’d like to hear your thoughts on the issue. Here are a few questions to think about.

• Where do you draw the line between inspiration and design theft?
• How would you feel if someone copied your popular blog design, and then released the theme without your permission?
• What if they were profiting of your copyrighted work, through direct theme sales (if it’s through a paid theme) or ad and affiliate revenues?

Sound off in the comments.

Update: Hafiz Rahman (previously mentioned in the post) has published a response: Theme Developers, Learn to Steal the Right Way!

Related posts:

1. WordPress Weekend Resources – May 22, 2009
2. 10+ Most Creative Free WordPress Themes in 2009
3. PowerTheme Premium WordPress Themes

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There’s a lot of hullabaloo regarding “SEO” when it comes to WordPress themes. In this series of posts, I’ll go over what most people believe is “good SEO” when it comes to web templates. If your theme doesn’t have it already, I’ll show you how to “correct” it.

• Content ordering, and how to make sure your content appears before the sidebar no matter the layout
• Clean, semantic markup, and how to eliminate unnecessary code from your themes
• Lots and lots of navigation, including the all-important breadcrumb navigation.
• The “All In One SEO” syndrome, how to integrate a custom write panel to control title and meta tags in your theme

I’ll update this post with links to the articles as I publish them. Think of the above as a dynamic outline of my “SEO friendly” WordPress theme series.

My Thoughts on “SEO friendly” WordPress themes

First up, here’s a challenge: try to find a premium WordPress theme for sale that doesn’t mention something related to “SEO” as one of the benefits. You’d be hard pressed to find a single one that hasn’t hopped on the “SEO friendly” bandwagon. But what does it actually mean?

I’ll tell you what it doesn’t mean. It has nothing to do with content, incoming links, outgoing links, you know, the things that actually count for something. That’s part of the reason why I’ve put every single mention of “SEO” in scare quotes, because it’s so much more than the on-site benefits that can be provided by the template you use.

For themes that have a clue, they probably do a lot of the things I’ve listed above very well. Whether or not your pages actually rank is another story, but “SEO friendly” themes can put you at a slight advantage, and that’s what I hope to show you how to do in this series of posts.

If you’re so obsessed with “optimizing” your site that you neglect creating quality content, link building, and the like, you may have a problem. Don’t go too overboard with this stuff, but don’t be completely ignorant to search engines and be so naive as to think, “all I have to do is create good content, and Google will love me!” Even amazing content needs to be promoted.

This post was originally meant to be a response to Alex Denning’s post called “Some Thoughts on SEO” and Jeff Chandlers post “Write For People, Not Spiders” but it evolved into this.

Am I Missing Anything?

Themes can provide the tools to help you, but they can’t hold your hand, make sacrifices to Google gods for plentiful traffic, or anything like that.

If there’s any on-site SEO that a theme is capable of doing that I’ve missed, please let me know and I’ll consider adding it to one of my future series posts.

Related posts:

1. WordPress Weekend Resources – July 3, 2009

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Finally, presenting the winner of theme battle #3. Tasty Showcase was a template designed by Brad of DemusDesign, who also coded it in XHTML/CSS/JS. I then took the coded template and ported it to WordPress. It has a ton of widgetized areas, including widgetized footers (plural).

Read on to see the features, including how to use the slider, in more detail…

The Slider

Displayed on the homepage, this Karmic Flow powered slider will display your four latest posts with a custom image should you choose.

Once you have a custom image sized 653×367 (653 pixels wide, 367 pixels high) simply input the absolute URL to the image in the built-in custom write panel.

If you don’t have an image, the theme will automatically use one of the placeholder images (depending on which slot it is) if you don’t specify one yourself. That means even if you don’t have any images, there will still be a different picture for each one.

Widgetized Areas

This theme is chock-full of widgetized areas, 14 to be exact. Here’s where they are, and what they do:

• Sidebar – Four areas, one full width above, two half widths, and one full width below
• Footer – Five areas, one for each column
• Home Footer – Four areas, one for each column
• 404 Template – One area, so you can customize your 404 pages

Keep in mind the “Home Footer” areas are only used on the homepage (where the slider is). The rest of the footer widget areas are controlled through the “Footer” ones, and affect every other page on the site besides the homepage.

The above diagram shows all the “Sidebar” and “Footer” widget areas. Not pictured are the “Home Footer” areas (basically the same place as the regular footer, except on the homepage) and the 404 template widget areas.

Conclusion

I bet you all forgot about theme battles, didn’t you? I know it was a few months between the conclusion of the voting and the release of the winning theme (this one) but better late than never.

Brad from DemusDesign was kind enough to code this one into XHTML/CSS and integrated the Javascript for the slider even though I usually code the winning theme battle themes myself. This time I just did the WordPress portion. You can get the static (non-WordPress) version on his site.

I’d also like to thank Cristian Antohe of Cozmos Labs for spotting a bug on the theme via Twitter. Also a special thanks to Omar Corrales of Slimmity who tested the theme himself and provided some good feedback, including several bug fixes before the release.

Anyway, since the time RS16 was released, I got the forums back online (with a matching bbPress theme) so if you have any support questions, they go there.

Let me know what you think of the theme in the comments, I’d really love to hear your feedback.

Related posts:

1. Jungleland – Free WordPress Theme
2. Newsworthy – Free WordPress Theme
3. RS11 – Free WordPress Theme

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A number of you have asked me what happened to my “WordPress Weekend Resources” series since I haven’t posted one of those since September 2009. Basically what I would do is roundup some of the top WordPress-related links I found during the past week, and posted them on the blog with my take on it.

I stopped doing it, because I was posting most of these links on my Twitter account already. Although, for those of you who don’t use Twitter, or follow so many people you might miss one of my tweets, I created a new community links page.

This page is an automatically updated list of tweets from my @themelab account with either a #WordPress hashtag and/or a #tlcom hashtag. The “tlcom” stands for Theme Lab Community, by the way. Also, remember it only posts tweets with my Twitter account, so don’t try to spam the hashtags thinking it’s going to show up on that page, because it’s not.

It’s powered by Juitter, a jQuery plugin, which uses the Twitter Search API to pull my latest tweets with that criteria. Being powered by the Twitter Search API, I believe it only goes back seven days, so make sure you check it at least once a week.

With that said, I have a couple questions for you:

• Would you still be interested in WordPress Weekend Resources returning? Although you can get more real-time information through Twitter, it has a temporariness attached with it, as you can only go back 7 days or so with the search API. Blog posts would be more permanent, plus there would be more room for information in the descriptions.
• Would you be interested in a tutorial on how to make your own “Community Links” page template in WordPress? Although it wouldn’t have to be community links, pretty much anything that you can search on Twitter could be put on an automatically-updated page on your site.

Let me know in the comemnts, thanks!

Related posts:

1. GaMerZ Plugins Now Compatible With WordPress 2.5
2. WordPress Weekend Resources – June 6, 2008
3. Elegant Themes Releases New Theme Options Page