acarnie

Hey moshu,

I don’t want to see WP become a bloated monster, I want to see slick, neat coding, quick loading and fast posting performance, but if that means having no features then where is it’s use?

I’m not suggesting that WP design it’s own gallery features, what I want and frankly need from it, is a much tighter and user friendly vision for plugin development. For example, it’s great that there is a plugin for Gallery2, unfortunately, in order to make it fit on a WP page with a reasonable text size and still look good, you need to hack the php code in order to switch off the sidebar in G2 or spend time endlessly tweaking the WP themes.

The plugin for coppermine has no button based interface interface in the editor, so unless you are comfortable with tagging, it is useless.

I don’t mind having drop in the odd tag here and there, but WP and it’s plugins are seemingly designed exclusively for either coders, or those who have the time and interest to spend digging into php, html and MySQL in order to get things up and running in a way that works for them.

When I first started in IT nearly 20 years ago, this state of affairs wouldn’t have bothered me at all, I would have just gotten on with it and made it work. 20 years on I just want software that works without much hassle (yeah, I know I’m just getting old… :)).

I’ll admit that some of my frustration comes from not understanding how to code myself, otherwise I probably wouldn’t be writing this now. That having been said, having spent nearly 20 years in the IT world as a network systems architect, I can say that if I could code then I would be designing plugins that are easy to install and use by the average user.

There is an air of unintentional snobbery about WP and it’s plugins that is preventing WP from reaching a bigger audience, and why a system such as squarespace and CMS like it are occupying an area of the market that WP should be able to compete in but currently can’t.

As I said before, this is not meant as a dig at all those responsible for WP, I think it is a great product with stacks of potential, all the cool stuff is hidden behind the need for hacking, tagging or coding of some sort. I know it’s not a popular thing to say around here, but I’d be prepared to pay for WP if it had the features I need, I like it that much.

Anyway, hope your having a good day and I’m looking forward to any response you want to make.

Cheers,

Ali…………..

I got a reply from Squarespace saying “ah, good point” They say they are going to fix this problem. When, is another question.

Hi Michael,

I’ve looked through both and export file and the mt.php script and there is no mention of ‘Draft’ or ‘Publish’ anywhere. I’m wondering if the output file from squarespace is not quite as MT Compatible as it claims. Do you know where I might find a sample export file from MT to compare the sturcture?

I’ve tried another SQL workaround, but my provider only has MySQL 4.0.2 and that doesn’t support sub queries.

I wouldn’t say that I have any real ‘expertise’ with SQL. My SQL skills are rustier than the Titanic, but I can piece together code with alot or errors and banging of heads in between until I get something that works.

Thanks,

Ali……….