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shelleyvadams / episcopal_wordpress-plugins

Plugins for the episcopal_wordpress project
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Migrate into a framework? #1

Open bethannon opened 9 years ago

bethannon commented 9 years ago

HI Shelley!

Thanks for offering up these themes! They look great!

I run a managed WP hosting solution that focuses on small/small-budget congregations (http://churchwebsiteprogram.com/). While we do offer custom designed themes as an upgrade, our base service uses "off the rack" themes with little to no customization. We use iTheme's Builder framework for our theme design because it offers a great feature for the users in terms of managing widget content, but also because it makes for quick design and stays current with WP core developments without us continually needing to do that on our own.

We currently do not offer any Episcopal-branded themes. I'm wondering if it would be ok to take your design & assets and migrate them into our framework to offer to Episcopal congregations as "off the rack" options. I'm glad to give you (and/or the group here, as appropriate) design credit. This would be a big help to small congregations who will never be able to afford a custom theme development project.

We are currently working with our local diocese, and hope to be connecting with more Episcopal congregations in the coming year. It probably will be a while before we get around to producing Episcopal themes, but I thought I'd ask here while I'm thinking about it.

Feel free to tweet me @bethannon if you want to connect up for an offline conversation.

Thanks!

shelleyvadams commented 9 years ago

Hi @bethannon,

You can certainly adapt and re-use the code here (episcopal_wordpress-plugins) and in the episcopal_wordpress project. That was the whole point of creating an open source project for these resources. :smiley: The code is licensed just like WordPress, under GPLv2 or higher. I'll make this explicit for episcopal_wordpress (the themes) once I double-check with Jake Dell about the image assets.

I'm not familiar with iThemes Builder, but I've been wanting to migrate the project to a different theme framework. I've added an issue to the project for the themes as a “note-to-self”: shelleyvadams/episcopal_wordpress#10

A little background... The original developer created the themes using Starkers 4.0. I find the template structure of Starkers framework rather clumsy, and that project's maintainer shuttered operations last September. I've looked at some of the forks; they either leave the template structure unchanged or seem unsuitable for this project.

Is iThemes Builder a commercial product, or an open source project? If the latter, I'm willing to explore migrating episcopal_wordpress as a whole, and we might be able to collaborate on that.

bethannon commented 9 years ago

Hi Shelley!

iThemes Builder is a commercial product.

I do recognize the value of open source, but most church folks doing their congregation's site don't keep up on security vulnerabilities or how changes in WP core affect their theme, so I think it's crucial to guide them to themes that are well-coded in the first place, going to continue to be developed, and offer some level of support for when problems crop up (as they almost certainly will at some point). In my mind, the best way to provide all that is a reputable commercial theme Or, maybe Jake will hire a developer to do that at the national level?--not likely. :-)