Displaying 1 To 21 Of 21 Comments Do You Mistrust A Company That Misspells WordPress? @Carl Hancock – The checks all cash the same, right? » Posted By Dave Doolin On May 18, 2013 @ 10:22 PM WordPress News Sites And The Bermuda Triangle Having spent a couple of years in this space, it finally came down to the economics for me. The information itself is commodity, finding a value add was beyond my skill. Good content is easily buried by SEO or social media experts, and much of the customer base, well, many expect services as well as information to be free. The competition is also stiff from bona fide professionals (respect, totally), who are willing to go a few rounds of freemium to grow their business. This freemium applies to services as well as information. The decision I faced was whether to 1. double (or triple) down and go another year essentially for free, 2. develop deep programming skills in PHP, or 3. make a lateral move into technology which had a viable employment market. I chose to move to Rails from WordPress based on market demand, and, importantly, the strength of engineering discipline in the Ruby and Rails community. I’m *really* happy a lot of that software engineering is moving into WordPress now. All that said, I’m positive there are a number of extremely lucrative business models with WordPress as a central piece of the technology stack. I’m out for this round to regroup, but the future overall looks pretty bright. Also, I consider my WP site in hibernation. No plans to take it down. » Posted By Dave Doolin On January 19, 2013 @ 2:54 PM Comparison Spreadsheet For Content Type And Custom Field Plugins I found it easier to learn how to code all this stuff up from scratch than to figure out which plugin does what. » Posted By Dave Doolin On December 1, 2012 @ 2:36 PM One Way To Make WordPress Less Portable @otto – +1 for json. Probably would not be that hard to change using an “extract and override” technique. The overridden call could be put in the deprecation queue for WP 4. My personal pet peeve `wp_parse_args` could be fixed the same way (that is, to call it what it really is, `wp_merge_array`). Good luck with the json. » Posted By Dave Doolin On April 14, 2012 @ 12:03 PM Twenty Twelve To Be Released With WordPress 3.5 Very cool they’re building out twentytwelve with modern tools! And on Github! Sweet! » Posted By Dave Doolin On March 21, 2012 @ 10:53 AM Determining Which Plugins Are Slowing Your Site Down That is cool that GoDaddy is sponsoring this. They really aren’t my favorite hosting company at the moment, but I know several people who host with them and have had excellent experience with GoDaddy service. » Posted By Dave Doolin On February 15, 2012 @ 4:48 PM Do You Want To See Plugin Specific Dashboard Widgets Disappear? If the widget serves a direct, useful purpose to operating the site, I’d like to see them stay or at least be optional. For example, Janis Elst’s Broken Link Checker plugin provides a stupendously convenient (for me) dashboard widget; checking the link status is part of my periodic chores list. » Posted By Dave Doolin On January 30, 2012 @ 2:30 PM Why WordPress Has Fewer Options, Not More Havoc is the real deal. I recall following his work very closely “back in the day.” For both coding and using, I prefer less options. Less options on the UI, less options in the API. Fewer plugins. My solution is wrapping the WP API calls that I use a lot into a file or files in a theme/lib directory, and load lib from functions.php. I’ve just started provisioning lib/ using the Rubygems system. It’s pretty cool to run Bundler and have your php files automatically installed. Or create a gemset targeted to a specific theme. So far, one small gem which is still really rough, but I’m liking how easy it is to use. » Posted By Dave Doolin On December 21, 2011 @ 1:12 PM Matt Mullenweg To Be In Charge Of The 2012 Default Theme Right on! Wish list: WordPress just gets more and more exciting to work on. That’s so cool. » Posted By Dave Doolin On December 21, 2011 @ 1:21 PM Case Study On How WordPress Won The Crown @Andrew Nacin – Ben’s document management plugin is *really* cool. I have to put a plug in (heh) here for Stephanie Leary’s Content Audit plugin. It’s helping me keep older articles updated and relevant. Even better, it “feels” like WordPress, like it’s a native piece of the system, and works that way too. » Posted By Dave Doolin On December 6, 2011 @ 2:47 PM @Jeffro – I agree, most of that doesn’t belong in core, not at all. What core is doing (from what I can see and understand), is evolving an API for building such components as CMS plugins, themes or even applications on WP core. I talked to a developer from Salon.com last week about their experience with WordPress, and he indicated they were delighted with how well it’s working out for them. Off to read Mr. Nacin’s comment next. » Posted By Dave Doolin On December 6, 2011 @ 2:40 PM @Kevinjohn Gallagher – Thanks for putting this out here in the cold light of day. I do a fair bit of silent teeth gnashing when over-exposed to the WP-is-a-CMS thing. Because, it’s not, yet, really. But. Considered as a Web CMS focusing on digital publication, it’s getting a lot better, really fast. Consider: * Content auditing should be in a CMS (including who touched what, when and whyfor), but full-on workflow? Where does the PM leave off and the CMS pick up? In any case, there are a couple of decent auditing plugins for WP now. Very helpful. * n-to-n content sharing can be done with a plugin. It’s very slick. * Access and role management can be handled with some coding on the capabilities API. I could go on, I won’t. Note: my comment is with respect to a web cms, not something you expect from a Documentum, Alfresco, installation, etc. Upshot, I’m really glad you posted because I agree with a lot of what you say, and I’m also really pleased WP is making moves in the right direction (and quickly, too). I hope this thread blows up (and I don’t get too badly singed!) It’s a great conversation and now is the right time to have it. » Posted By Dave Doolin On December 5, 2011 @ 7:05 PM @Jeffro – yes, absolutely, WordPress is a slam dunk with respect to content publishing. I like to refer to WordPress as a “Digital Publication Engine.” And I can’t think of a better one. » Posted By Dave Doolin On December 5, 2011 @ 6:55 PM WPCandy Set To Publish First WP Centric Print Magazine I’m a big fan of print media. I tend to trust printed material which has been thoroughly vetted, especially from select publishers. Pragmatic Programmers, John Wiley and Addison Wesley come to mind. Good luck to Ryan, I hope it’s successful enough that the price can come down by half with twice the profit. » Posted By Dave Doolin On November 26, 2011 @ 1:21 PM Incsub LLC Accused Of Copyright Infringement @Deryk, nicely said. In some real sense, marketing turns everything into shades of grey, but it’s worth the effort to stay far, far into the lighter shades of those greys. » Posted By Dave Doolin On November 17, 2011 @ 9:12 PM Drupal And WordPress Founders Share The Same Stage What I never see mentioned these days is the what I recall as the main point of contention between WordPress and Drupal: how the administration interface was handled: Having used Drupal & WordPress back in 2005/2006, at the time, it was not at all clear which platform was superior. Frankly, at the time, Drupal really seemed like the way to go. There is one other technical detail which may have put WordPress ahead in terms of installed users: schema. The WordPress schema allows very easy updating. I can’t speak about the Drupal schema directly, but I can say that Drupal upgrades (for me, back in the day) were tricky enough that I ended up not updating Drupal for one site. Upgrade difficulty is why I no longer run Mediawiki. It might be trivial now, back then it was a major PITA for an inexperienced user. » Posted By Dave Doolin On October 10, 2011 @ 1:50 PM Sara Cannon On Responsive Web Design From WordCamp Boston Sara is cool, I attended her presentation at WordCamp SF a few weeks ago. It’s interesting, after 10-12+ years of CSS, we still find amazing things to do with it. Makes it (almost) worth the pain of really learning it, inside out. » Posted By Dave Doolin On September 23, 2011 @ 8:50 PM Plugin Quality Not Plugin Quantity Otto said it best over on wpcandy: it’s not the number of plugins, it’s how the plugins you have operate. » Posted By Dave Doolin On September 23, 2011 @ 9:00 PM @jeffro, I’m in a similar position with Website In A Weekend as you are with WP Tavern. I actually have made some coin, but it turns out the site was better at establishing my credibility and expertise than it was at moving product. Likewise, I’m not that interested in low-margin, high-volume sales, and as it turns out, I prefer the authorship end of publication over the publishing end of publication. However, I’m both winding down and ramping up. On the winding down side, not going to post myself on a frequent schedule. Perhaps monthly with articles going into far greater depth than the usual dreck found in Blogistan. On the ramping up side, going to overall the presentation of all the material, and continue to publish guest posts. (Expect an email from me at some point.) » Posted By Dave Doolin On September 4, 2011 @ 1:07 PM Ryan is a really cool guy, I met him at WordCamp SF. Turns out he lives right around the corner from my parents! (A long way from San Fran) I recall (i.e., IIRC) when he started out he was going to give ad-free a shot, which influenced how I was thinking about monetizing myself as our content (at that time) overlapped a little bit. It was a little distressing as his costs (rent, etc) are a lot lower and the business environment in Indiana is a lot friendlier to small businesses than in California (Hey, Jerry Brown, are listening?). But that’s business, and it’s a good thing. I have no doubt Ryan is going to continue to knock it out of the ball park. And truth be told, The Summit City (Fort Wayne) is an excellent place to build exactly what he is building. » Posted By Dave Doolin On September 4, 2011 @ 12:52 PM @donnacha of WordSkill – gloss != innovation, to be sure. I’ve been rooting around in core, and while I see some truly hair curling code, I also see both vast opportunity for improvement… and that improvement actually taking place. One of the most exciting things I’ve seen lately is a plugin which emits a static site from a WordPress installation. Obviously, commenting has to be handled 3rd party, but that’s not a bad thing. I’m currently writing static sites with combinations of POSH, Erb and various and miscellaneous Ruby utilities and Rake files. Static html from WP sounds pretty darn cool. I have to agree, WordPress’ potential has barely been scratched. » Posted By Dave Doolin On May 5, 2011 @ 3:02 PMComments Posted By Dave Doolin
* More modularity using locate_template
* Blueprint/Foundation/Bootstrap-style framework using SMACSS (.com) conventions
* More separation of concerns; reduce inline js and css, drive html with locate_template, etc.
* WordPress: separate UI for administration.
* Drupal: nearly identical UI for readers and administrators.
This turned out to be a lot more important than people realized at the time.
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