Jul 17 2008
My CMS system choice
Alright, two weeks further and i’m almost ready… to launch this site.
WordPress is a wonderful CMS system! That’s why it became my CMS choice.
But some things had to be done first. One of those things was to go to the cinema and see: “Sex And The City” (the movie). Just kiddin’!… Or not?!
SATC short review ;-)
I indeed did go to the cinema (last week) and saw the movie. Got the tickets, glamour magazine and even a huge SATC poster from a friend, as she said: “invite some of your girlfriends and go and have a fun”. Unfortunately, none of my best (girl)friends watched regulary SATC (except one of them but she’s on a long vacation now), as far as I know it, so I went to the cinema with a girl I just know from the pub.
Have to mention that while watching the movie, the woman in a front of me almost killed me for making annoying sounds while eating the chips, like: “can’t you eat chips at home? Can’t you see how serious this film theme is?!”… while she all excited sat at the top of her chair and probably often going red by keeping her breath for too long. As it was not enough embarrassment for me that there were only 4 guys (including me) watching, in a room with at least 100 women! Nice.
Before I jump to the subject that matters, I’d like to mention that I liked the movie a lot and wasn’t dissapointed (as I previously expected) at all. Although I can imagine, to some people who didn’t follow the series, it could be possible that the movie doesn’t make any sense at all. Except that it contains loads of humor perhaps. For instance, the movie characters don’t get introduced… which points to the idea that movie is made exclusively for the SATC series fans. Needless to say, there is no way for someone who didn’t follow the series to have an accurate idea of who Mr.Big is and how badly did Carry hit on him and got hurt (in the past). If being completely honest (thus objective) he’s portrayed in a kind of negative way (in order to satisfy mainly [95%] female audience?)… which of course (the true fans know it!) shouldn’t be the case, while he in a fact, is very cool guy! For the rest, ‘the girls’ did entertain the public, as usual. So the movie is definitely worth seeing.
Having said that, let’s move on.
My CMS system choice
The CMS WordPress I’m curently using, is a wonderful system! Which I unfortunately can’t say for “Gallery2″ application - and here is why: Gallery2 has beautiful features (otherwise I would never use it) but it was pain in the ass intergrating it with WP. It took me 2 days just to get it correctly within WP interface, which I think is a shame. Gallery2 admin (interface) management sucks too! So, what still bugs me, is this: how can (obviously) smart developers have a such blind spot for “usability”?
The very same reason kept me off all other CMS systems, and that’s why I finaly chose WordPress. Let’s face it, Joomla might be a ‘rocket science’ from developers point of view, but it’s a ‘piece of crap’ from USERS point of view for whom it is made in first place! What I mean is this: I want to ride a bicycle and come to the store to buy one. But no.. mister salesman wants to sale me a space shuttle! And all I can do is stare at it and wonder, will I ever be able simply to come from point A to a point B, which is really unsignificant distance, while flying a space shuttle, that in a way takes me miles away from my desired destination??? Nopes! Not without some sweat and tears first at least. And there it is. That’s why it sucks.
Here I do not suggest that WordPress is as simple as a bicycle, no in contrary. It offers a lot!
The clue is, it’s built user friendly, so you don’t have to be Einstein in order to figure out how to do something as simple as to publish your first page. And that’s where the most other CMS systems fail - and they fail badly - Joomla included.
A while ago, I made a proposal to a friend of mine who’s a programmer. I told him something that was as simple as this: “Listen, I’ll design the user interface - if you program it. The user interface should contain 3 simple (yet user friendly) choices:
a) To log in as an ‘absolute beginner user’ where you can make the categories, publish the pages, and switch to ‘average’ or ‘advanced’ modus… nothing more.
b) To log in as an ‘average user’ where you have all absolute beginner user options, but installing plugins and similar.
c) To log in as an ‘advanced user’ who can use all CMS features as they are already.
And he said something like: “But why? I feel fine by using this CMS as it is. I can do with it whatever I want.”
He obviously just didn’t get it. Did he?!
Anyways, for the Joomla camp folks: listen guys, you’re undoubtly brilliant and all.. and I’m not a hater. I even made a website for someone running Joomla, so it should be a proof… But I just don’t think I’ll be using that CMS system any time soon - and it’s (nothing) personal!
Back to Wordpress
Alright. Back to WP. The setup is there, important plugins are there. It’s tuned up and I’m almost ready to go. Was it the matter of bad luck, I don’t know, but as soon as I started running WP 2.5, there came version 2.6, just a few days later. The developers claim they solved more then 190 bugs, which is nice… but also scarry a little. How many are there left which are not solved? And how dangerous are they? Hmmm… it’s not in my nature to be a paranoid, so I take it for what it is and will most likely migrate this weekend on the new version. The makers also claim that migration from version 2.5 to 2.6 wont cause major problems as far as templates and plugins are concerned. As I’m an optimist, I therefore chose to believe them. So let’s see what is going to happen within next few weeks…
Models writers
There is another interesting thing that concers World Traveling Artist: 3 models (writers), two of them also journalism students, have promissed me to write the columns for “my life as a model” category. The idea is to make the site content more interesting for WTA readers. I hope some of these models (co-writers) shall publish their first articles before this site gets launched some time next week. And otherwise, I’ll launch the site anyway.
