Well, last week I thought I knew enough about WordPress to get by, but it seems WordPress is like a Baptist church, it was the right size when the congregation started but then they had to expand it and now you have to go three steps up to get from the vestibule to the sanctuary, but the fellowship hall was built on the old parking lot, so that’s an entire two flights of stairs with a door that goes nowhere on the first landing and none of the tile matches.
I had to make a file to keep track of whether I was in an plug in, in the web app, in the Safari app, or in Admin, or in my site.
They have an excellent series of videos that explain how to do specific tasks, but not the big picture.
So that’s been perplexing, but I’m starting to be able to tell where I am. (Safari is varying levels of black, plug-ins are white, iPad apps are grey.)
I have a deep fear I will go around a WordPress corner and see a menu that just says “Convert from TypePad.”
2 responses to “TWIL: A little more about WordPress”
YES this is the main reason why I don’t like WordPress. It’s powerful, and there is functionality to do almost anything you might possibly want, but 1. it is in all these overlapping tacked-on widgets and modules and plug-ins and 2. you have to buy some of them and 3. when you have installed more than one widget/plug-in/etc. then if they’re not both extremely common ones that most people use both of, you get into the Land of Medication Side Effects and everything gets very, very weird and extraordinarily hard to debug.
(this also means that “oh, yeah, every web dev company can alter your wordpress site” is an absolute lie; yes, almost everyone can work with *the set of widgets and plugins they use* but there are so many options and so many pay-to-use ones that you’ll often get unique patched-together sets and… sorry, but no one can wade into that and debug it effortlessly, and most people will quit trying after 10 minutes or so. The most common thing in that case is for a website development/design company to carefully preserve what it *looked* like and then nuke all the widgets/plug-ins/etc. and rebuild what it looked like using the set of tools they’re familiar with. And then you have a new set of proprietary plug-ins and widgets. The GOOD companies make sure they use widgets that are not buggy and use them with other widgets that do not cause trouble with those widgets; but probably 80% of the jobs are done by scrappy, scattershot, zippy web dev companies that assemble the WordPress website with duct tape and glue and walk away as it creaks and totters. “oh, you want the text in that weird little side area to be the same font as it is everywhere else? Sorry, can’t do that, contract is up…”)
Anyway. May the tutorials and the main functionality serve you well! (and try not to bolt too many things on, if you can get away with it!)
(also: I do not think there’s *anything* for converting the styling of a blog from X into wordpress, including from wordpress into wordpress, and if there was it would most likely result in a wild pile of spaghetti with all sorts of extremely strange glitches. And you’ve already used the automated tools for shuffling the contents over, so I think you’re safe from finding a “do all this stuff for you, except in one click!” button. I think.)
KC – Oh, I am exceptionally talented at mucking up software with extra add-ons. I do love debugging, though.