UPDATED August 16, 2010

After a lot of thought, I have decided to open the majority of my smiley, emoticon, and pixel-font work for Commercial use. They are being licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-No Derivative Works 3.0 United States License.

This page is to outline my requirements for use of my graphics. Allowing commercial use without payment is a big thing and I hope that users will be fair and honor my small requests in return for the use.

• I must be credited somewhere in the project. If it is a website and there is a credits page, I request that my name and moniker be used. Example: Smileys by Michelle Lehmann (a/k/a Mirz123).

• With the credit, there should be a link-back to this site. It may be a small text link and does not have to be clickable. However, it should point to the main page of http://www.scriptmonkeys.us.

• You may not modify the smileys or build upon them. If you need something special, please contact me. I do commission work. However, for the right project I might be willing to do some freebies.

• If you have a commercial website, blog, etc., you may use the images and/or fonts without payment.

• You may not sell the images on their own or as part of a pack. In short, you may not profit from the direct sale or distribution of this font. As example, and to make this more clear, you cannot add the smileys/emotes to a CD of smileys you are selling. However, if you are developing a forum system which you intend to sell, you may include the smileys in that project. If you have ANY questions about this provision, email me and I will be happy to clarify. If you are interested in distributing the individual graphics or fonts on their own, a different license is required and available. Please contact me to discuss terms.

• For commercial products and/or websites, you must contact me and let me know you are using my fonts and/or graphics. This is not for restrictive purposes, but the fact that I like to know when my work is being used for profit. It’s also a general courtesy. In addition, I must be provided with a copy of the final product (or link to a website/blog/etc.) so I can include same in my portfolio.

• My previous terms of use still apply. You may use my works, free-of-charge, for non-commercial use on your chats, websites, blogs, forums, and other systems. You may re-distribute them on collection sites as long as they are offered free-of-charge (no subscription needed, payment for premium content, etc.), as long as the filename and credit remains in-tact. For non-commercial uses, I appreciate a credit and link-back to my page, but it’s not required.

As an open-source developer and user myself, I understand and appreciate the value of good, free-use, resources. I know that offering this license may open my work up to abuse. But, honestly, if people are devious enough to not live up to the TOS, they would have most likely violated the terms even if I hadn’t changed the license. This change is for all of the good, fair, and honest people out there who want and need quality resources for their projects.

Of course, if you ever need custom graphics done, I hope you’ll keep me in mind.

Legal Stuff: These terms of service may be changed from time to time, without notice. I reserve the right to revoke this license at any time.

When we initially did our template design for Phorum, we created 17 templates. We wanted to do a few more, featuring some more “simplistic” designs (essentially non-graphic designs). Our plan was to do maybe 6 to 12 more. When all was said and done, we had created over 20 more templates! As I mentioned before, we wanted to bring Phorum up to speed with many of the other systems out there that have a wide variety of templates. However, another reason was simply because there are so many good designs I have wanted to port to another system–as well as designs just shooting around my head–that I simply found myself adding “just one more” to the tune of a dozen or so.

There are at least a dozen more graphics I would have loved to make into a template, but I had to stop myself. There just isn’t enough time right now and we need to move back to some of our other projects. Someday, though…

Someone recently asked me why we would spend weeks creating templates for a forum system we didn’t have any official connection to. Well, first of all, that’s the real spirit of open source software. It’s the community coming together to support and create. It’s amazing what a collective can do.

As for the specifics of how we got involved with Phorum, a few months ago I was once again actively looking to upgrade the forum system for my large family site, Lotsofkids.com . The forums there are very popular. We get several thousand posts and several million hits a month.. The old system we were using was Jim’s forum system called RWF (short for Ravenswood Forums). What was amazing about RWF was that it was 100% coded by Jim and the level of functionality it had was astounding, considering it was done by 1 man mostly at nights and on weekends. However, as time marched on, Jim had less and less time to spend on it. Technology just forged ahead. We desperately needed to update the software, but the prospect had us looking at 6-9 months of coding. Jim was willing to do it, and I was willing to let him, but I felt there had to be another package out there that might be able to help. I had tried most of the other big name forum packages, but none seemed able to be modified to work similarly to RWF. That is, until we found Phorum.

I won’t bore you with the details, but it took only a bit over 2 weeks to convert our whole system. We managed to keep 90% of the look and functionality of RWF, which was a major feat in itself–and a testament to both Phorum and Jim’s programming skills. The few things we lost in the process, we gained in useability. The forums became much easier to administer which made my life MUCH easier. You can peek at one of the LOK forums HERE to see how we modified them.

When considering Phorum, once of the things I noticed is that there were not a lot of available templates for the system. This wasn’t a problem for us since we were going to skin it to look like the old RWF. However, I realized that if there were more templates, other people might be more willing to use this software. That was something both Jim and I wanted to see happen, so we made the decision to “just do it.”

We spent about 3 weeks designing and coding the templates. I designed the look using a graphics program and Jim then coded the templates and CSS. Jim did an amazing job working under my (oftentime) stringent specifications. Another plus side to this endeavor is that we hoped it would be a good display of Jim’s CSS skills. In the “old” days (like 3-4 years ago), I was much better than Jim at CSS. That’s just not true now. He really can do wonders with it. What started as doing 3-4 templates eventually turned into designing/porting over a dozen designs.

We’re pretty excited with our work. Of course, there is no way to know if the world will be any better because of our contribution. Still, it does feel good to give something back. We’re also hopeful that Phorum will get a greater following because of it.

So, that’s the story of our little trek into the Phorum templating “business.” Not very exciting or glamourous, but not much is these days. For now, we’re finishing up a few additional designs for Phorum and then I think we’re gonna stretch our legs and start working on something else…like blog templates.