The Lighthouse Keeper’s cat

Background

WordPress – as most other “Blog” applications – handles media (images and video) content as “Attachments”. You write a Post and you attach an image using ‘Add Media’. The system does all the magic, scales the image in 3 sizes, allows multiple images per post. You even can add those multiple images as a gallery to a post…

Criticism

The approach in its current form is not working for me as Writer, Blogger, Publisher. Images are Posts not Attachments. I want to post an Image, not a Post. An Image is as differnet to a Post as a Page is to a Post (‘WordPress universe’ wording). Images have specific particular features, in both back (administration) and front-end (themes) aspects. The ‘advanced’ user needs more control in templates and template tags.

I am an Information Architect not a coder (developer), but this is how I see it: In a OOP metaphor an Image is a Post with specific ‘extensions’. If I would define a Post as a Class, an Image would be a Post Sub-Class. It would inherit all template tags while adding a few pieces of magic.

The Image ‘content type’

This is what I imagine would be possible without reinventing the (WordPress-) wheel…

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… I am a big believer in the Linux philosophy small pieces loosely joined. The future of WordPress is not a giant monolithic thing, that has all the features in the world. … which is honestly the direction a lot of competing CMS are going…

Matt Mullenweg – August 8, 2009 WordPressCamp New Zealand

Hear, Hear ^_^ …

To be honest  WordCamp New Zealand Day One was a surprise … a positive one ^_^. The best thing you can take home from any (un)conference is this feeling of being charged with energy, ready to go and make the world a better place… and this time it actually worked…

It was not only the quality of the speakers, it was the mixture. Jason Kemp, Dan Milward and Anthony Cole managed to get a wide range of presentations together, starting with Steven Price trying to keep bloggers out of legal trouble and Dan’s talk about eCommerce plugin. Old fashioned me is skeptical about the theme generator thingy, I admire what Ryan Hellyer achieved… it is just that I myself believe that software only gets you so far. To get your fingers dirty with a bit of code is not a bad thing…

Philip Fierlinger, Work Head of Design at Xero, is always great to listen to. There was heaps to learn from his experience with corporate blogging at Xero.

Now… personally I was really surprised by Matt Mullenweg – co-founder of WordPress and director of Automattic. “… one of PC World’s Top 50 People on the Web, Inc.com’s 30 under 30, and Business Week’s 25 Most Influential People on the Web.” (source http://ma.tt/)… whatever that might mean … his answers were smart, engaging and having this flair of professional honesty… you know, the one were you never know what actually is true and what is purely professional. I myself chose to believe the words. I think the world is not completely lost if there are people out there like Mike to keep open source what it should be and not just choosing it as a marketing stand to sell their products or services. Even so – I assume – he is a multi-millionaire, (Matt Mullenweg on Wikipedia) guess what? fair enough…

Gareth Townsend presentation on the new WordPress iPhone App did make me think… yup that is how it actually should work, so once they get this release out, we can look forward to some real cool stuff in the future. And Doug Casement is a legend anyway.

I am looking forward to tomorrow.

My Fazit so far ….

… I will keep on complaining about WordPress… as well as keep using it for all my web projects ^_^ and telling everybody else they should use it, but I will be very careful when I use “kids coding” again. I think the kids grow up fast…

… and I really would like to find an angle to contribute …

P.S. why is Tiny MCA doing this to me… ARGH if I click on remove formatting, I would like you to remove “§$%&/() formatting ….. ^_^…. see?

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Take care world outside!

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Post Script: After years of struggling I finally gave up on the ideas of thumbnails on posts… WordPress you have it your way ^_^…

Which reminds me of something else: in a meeting with a client I was told that the system should not overrule editorial decisions… hmm… Even though I agree in principal: Most editorial decisions which are NOT supported by online best practice would not have made it into print* . They made it onto websites just because they can… Just because you can dose not mean you should…^_^…

* based on 10 years experience in the online biz. It still is is subjective though.

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Post Post Script: I think I even go with out the <more> tag for a while…

YAY! I am back… the thing is my tags and my thumbnails are not really with me :-(… The Lighthouse Keeper’s Cat is a bit of a mess at the moment! Actually the upgrade to 2.5.1 was not too bad, my custom build theme is causing the most of the issues (OUCH)…
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While rewriting my theme I discovered that the blog actually was hacked. Hidden links to websites were added to my code. This is a known security issue, with my WordPress version :-(… I will put the blog off-line, until the new one is ready. I am sorry and I hope to be back online soon!

At least this might explain some of the other issues

See you soon

I love WordPress. I really do! Everybody who knows me, knows that I LOVE WordPress. I went to WordPress.org searching for something today. Oops! All shiny and new, no worries looking good…. eh… It took me two minutes to find the keyword search.
It is where you would expect it to be, but the search input field is in camouflage! It was so disappointed of being a text field it dressed itself as a button! Poor thing! … Read the rest of this entry »