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v1.21

Created by dave. Last edited by dave, 19 years and 132 days ago. Viewed 4,177 times. #4
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Wordpress v1.21

Alright, I’ve used this thing now for two weeks, and I think that I don’t like it. It isn’t that I intensely dislike it; it is more that I find that the tool has enough foibles and quirks that it gets in the way of the way I want to work.

Let’s be clear here – this probably mostly about the tool not working the way I do.

So what don’t I like?

  • I do not understand the CSS that is used to control the mark-up. This means that I can not do anything to change the way that things are displayed, and am therefore stuck with the defaults. And those defaults are not very attractive to me.(Update: Not knowing CSS hasn't hurt me, there are a bunch of cookie-cutter themes available for download. I've found one which I like better, and am much happier.)
  • The create post window has a text field which is too short (probably modifiable though either php or html rewriting). Making the font a little nicer (ie clearer and smaller) would be an acceptable substitute. (Update: The number of lines in the edit window is a configurable option. The font size is probably a CSS tweak...)
  • The create post window needs a Save And Continue Editing button so that you can see a representation of the post without having to hit Save As Draft and then selecting the draft you just saved.
  • The whole user (editing users, not commenting users) mechanism is wa-a-a-ay overdeveloped. The vast majority of sites will not require 10 levels of user granularity.
  • If a user has an account, and is logged in, it would be nice if the comment form recognized that and was pre-filled out when it was brought up.
  • Because this does not happen, it is not immediately obvious to a new administrator that there is no point in having registration open to everyone (which it is, by default).
  • I like the idea of being able to highlight text and then clicking on a button to apply the appropriate tags around the text; however, the resulting text window is displayed from the top. This means you select text, click a button, then scroll the window down and click back in the box. This may be a browser limitation, observed in FireFox PR1 on Windows and Mozilla (whatever is up-to-date on Fedora Core 2); but it is pretty inconvenient if you have a long post requiring a lot of mark-up near the bottom. (Update: Actually, just playing with it on FireFox PR1 on Windows, I have discovered that this is almost moot -- the cursor remains in the right place in the text stream, and any keypress brings the window back to the correct positioning.)
  • The 'Dict' button is a neat idea. Except for, I don't know, the fact that it POPS UP ANOTHER DAMN WINDOW to tell you what the answer is. Is there no way that other windows can open themselves in a tab instead of creating a new browser window?!
  • All that said, I still prefer the simple in-line markup language that SnipSnap uses.
  • And I think that I like the idea of the integrated wiki.
The real thing of it is, I guess, is that I want something like SnipSnap, written in PHP or perl or something I can easilly run on a remote web host.

I am going to stick with this thing for now and try to figure out the CSS thing a little better. Hopefully I can make the appearance suck a little less.

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