a pint of javascript (and general web stuff)

let me tell you something: editing a wordpress theme using the wordpress interface plainly sucks.

And no, it’s not a problem of being a newbie in wordpress, it’s just that there’s too much duplicated code revolving on the structure, at least on the default Kubrick theme that is supposed to be the one that shows off most of wordpress “features”.

the first challenge:

adding a wrapper around the content and sidebar.
This could have been easy, if only I didn’t have to dig through six different files and manually inject the same code on each one of them. Yay for templates!
Come on wordpress staff, you can do it better, i want my header, footer and basic layout on *every* page of the site *unless* I specify the contrary, it’s a big let down if my “templated system” makes me go through every top-level page to inject two lines of code on each of them. Learn from Ruby-on-Rails, CakePHP or Symphony, where you specify your top-level layout and it’s used site-wide unless you direct the framework not to do it.

on the second day, God created blog entries:

and did it the wrong way. The same issue as with the layout, was now worsened with entries. I had to dig through five different files to *try* to unify the way entries were to be displayed on every page of my site. Appart from being tiresome it’s horribly error prone, what get us to the third point…

there’s no f*cking undo:

if you mistakenly hit the “update file” button in the middle of an edit while there are still errors to fix there’s no way to go back. Even worse, I was editing my CSS externally and copy&pasting on the wordpress admin the whole stuff… all was fun and games until I accidentally overwritten the Main Index Template. Poof! all my previous edits gone without a single undo button. How hard could have been to implement an undo feature like the one in gmail?

now *that* is something to write home about

the sad conclusion:

after going through all of this I figured out I went with the wrong blogging software [duh!].
However, it’s too late to go back and start from scratch. May be next time (or when free time is on my side again) I will choose another blogging software suite.
And yes, I think the same as you: this is the saddest attempt at a first blog entry in the whole history of the blogosphere… so be it!

This entry was posted on Monday, July 30th, 2007 at 7:10 pm and is filed under design, html, rant, usability. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.