Alkivia site has been relaunched. As you can see, a complete new design as been done for the site. This new design will unify the look of all our main sections and sites:

• The blog (this one).
• Our new documentation site.
• The code browser. (Now you can download any branch or tag).
• The bug tracker and feature requests system.

We tried to create a very clean an light theme for our site and make it easy to help you to stay current with all developments and documentation. The new design is based on the Chameleon Theme and it is a child theme of it.

Plugin and theme pages provide now the most up to date information about any development. You will find information about the current version, the WordPress versions it works on, and the last update date. In all plugin and theme pages you will find, at the bottom, useful links to all related information. We wanted to provide an overview page which points to all information you can need.

Documentation in our wiki is being written just now, so some pages can be missing or inaccurate. Sure you will understand this as will be more complete and finished in next days. Also, more improvements will come as there are some site plans for the immediate future. Keep in touch!

Sideposts widget 3.0 has been released. This version is a major plugin rework that makes more flexible to get your aside posts in the way you want.

With this version, a new templating system has been introduced. From now, the widget output comes out from templates which makes more easy to customize the widget and to create your own aside post format. This templates can be selected on every widget you create with Sideposts and templates for the same options than prior versions are provided. From now, under the ’show’ selection box, you get the list of available templates to use.

It’s really easy to create a new template and or to customize an existing one. Just take a look to the plugin templates directory to see how work the ones provided.

To make it easy to upgrade the plugin, we recommend to follow this simple steps:

Create your template and save it to a folder outside the plugin directory. (The plugin directory is fully deleted on automatic upgrades).

Create a file named ‘alkivia.ini’ in the wp-content directory, and set on it the path to your custom templates folder.  This folder will be added as additional templates search location. You have an ‘alkivia.ini’ sample on the samples directory. Also, if you want to remove the bottom link to archives and the RSS icon, you have an option in the ‘alkivia.ini’ file to do it.

More information about configuring is available on our wiki.

If you’re maintaining a translation, or considering to do it, visit our wiki page with information about translating. Just a new translators mailing list have been started to discuss and talk about how to translate, the problems you find and general instructions about all related with translations.

We suggest from today start using this tools as it will make publishing your translations more easy.

Just released Capability Manager 1.3 plugin. This plugin helps you to manage roles and capabilities allowing you to add or to assign new capabilities to a role, create new roles or delete existing ones.

This new release has been ported to new Alkivia Framework and includes some requested features focused when granting capabilities to create, edit or delete users:

• Cannot edit users with more capabilities than current user.
• Cannot assign to users a role with more capabilities than current user.
• Cannot delete a user with a role that cannot be managed.
• Added a link to the new plugin documentation at the new Alkivia wiki.

Some small bugs have been corrected which produced an incompatibility with Alkivia Chameleon theme.

From this version, the license under this plugin is released is GNU General Public License version 2. This change is to use the same license than WordPress to be fully license compatibles.

As you know, from WordPress 2.9 there is an easy way to embed videos and pictures in a post or page, you have only to paste the video page URL to the post content and you will get the embedded video or image. As WordPress uses the oEmbed standard, not all sites will provide media in the proper format, only some of them do it. Sites I know providers of  this feature are Vimeo, YouTube, Vidler, Flickr and some others. Check the known providers at oEmbed site.

Some users have reported issues embedding videos from YouTube on a post. I checked this, and as very little information was provided, was hard to find where the problem was and what caused it. I found the problem only with YouTube videos and only in some WordPress configurations. This is not a theme problem or a WordPress problem. This is something wrong with the YouTube oEmbed site or with a particular video.

The most common error is that the video author do not allow embedding the video outside YouTube, you can do nothing with that, just get a different video. Other strange behavior is with media embedding size (set on the WordPress media settings). I had the trouble with some sizes embedding specific videos. Just changing it one pixel above or one below worked with no problems. This seems to be solved at YouTube and seems them are working on this.

A sample of how oEmbed works by just pasting the video URL is that 5 seconds video:

As always, just remember that support questions sent directly to me or posted on the posts comments will get no answer. Please, redirect your support questions to the support forums you will find on each product page.

I discovered that it is an small licensing issue with all released themes and plugins. This issue is because I released them under the GPL version 3 license and this license is not compatible with the WordPress license. WordPress is released under the terms of GPL version 2 license and WordPress developers did not include the possibility to develop derivate works in a newer GPL version. That is, WordPress is under the GPL version 2 only license. As themes and plugins are considered a work based on WordPress should all them to be released under a license compatible with GPL version 2, and version 3 of the GPL is indeed no compatible with version 2. You can read this at the Free Software Foundation compatibility page.

So, starting today, any new release of any plugin or theme will only be released under the terms of GPL version 2 license while current released version will remain GPL version 3 licensed. This means that current themes and plugins versions can be used on other projects by the terms or GPLv3 but this applies only to the plugin or theme code, and you must know that distributing current themes and plugins with WordPress would violate both licenses (WordPress and my Themes and Plugins license).

To prevent licenses violation and to make all my themes and plugins fully compatible with WordPress license, I grant you this additional necessary rights to the current releases of my themes and plugins:

1. You are granted to switch the license of the WordPress themes and plugins copyrighted by Jordi Canals (me), to GNU General Public License version 2.
2. Here and now, you’re allowed to change the license file included on my current themes and plugins by the GNU General Public License version 2 license file as published by the Free Software Foundation and included within the original WordPress package.
3. You are allowed to replace any reference to GPL version 3 license within the code with a reference to GPL version 2. If you do that, you have the obligation to remove the sentence “or (at your opinion) any later version”. To do this, use the following text:

This program is free software; you can redistribute it and/or
modify it under the terms of the GNU General Public License
version 2 as published by the Free Software Foundation.

This program is distributed in the hope that it will be useful,
but WITHOUT ANY WARRANTY; without even the implied warranty of
MERCHANTABILITY or FITNESS FOR A PARTICULAR PURPOSE.  See the
GNU General Public License for more details.

You should have received a copy of the GNU General Public License
along with this program; if not, write to the Free Software
Foundation, Inc., 51 Franklin Street, Fifth Floor, Boston, MA  02110-1301, USA.

This granted rights apply only to this themes and plugins releases:

• Alkivia Open Community version 0.9.3
• Capability Manager version 1.2.5
• Inline Pagelist version 1.5.8
• SidePosts widget version 2.5.1
• Alkivia Chameleon version 2.1

Any other plugin version will fully maintain the license terms included on the package.

Just as I received some questions about it, I want to clarify the license allows you to remove the public author attribution on the Chameleon theme and you have a check box on the theme settings page to do it on the easiest way (this is the page footer). To do that, you don’t need any special permission and you don’t need any other license. You are not allowed to remove the copyright notices inside the code as it is a copyrighted work (and those are only visible by browsing the source code).