Michael Heilemann

Someone needs to take a nice chilled glass of ‘calm the fuck down’.
First of all, forum-faring people that you are, I’m as amazed as Matt that despite this being a Kubrick & WordPress specific thread, a select few of you continue to scream bloody murder over a comment of mine.
By all means, feel free to contact me directly if you feel that I have somehow insulted you. Not only does it guarantee you a reply, but you’ll not clutter up an already crowded forum, not to speak of diverting attention from the subject at hand.
Root: You took the designs offline because a few people disagree with you? You definitely need to learn how to deal better with criticism, _and_ that being an antagonizing vain dork gets you nowhere, fast.
You and Mr. StopWPCensorship (I’ll get to you in just a few paragraphs) are so busy shouting and fussing that you managed to stomp your feet like a pair of prissy little teen drama queens and ask for ‘evidence’ a half dusin times or so… While I was sleeping!
Jeez, calm down. WordPress, Kubrick, Gemini, Trident… They’re hobby projects people, not US foreign policy.
I’m excited that you’re dedicated to bettering WordPress for people. Very cool. But right now there’s a lot of pointing fingers, screaming of doomsday and what not. Yet no one knows a damn thing about what the end result will be.
So far, a lot of time has been poured into this project by a lot of people, in particular the core devs. And they have managed to make a great deal of good decisions.
So far most of these decisions were made behind ‘closed doors’, and it seems to me that thanks to this little tantrum, that’s going to happen a lot more in the future, despite what everyone really want.
Yet, so far I haven’t seen ONE person ask Matt the most crucial and decisive question:
“So, could you outline what you had in mind? I mean, for instance, will it be as clumsy to install as Kubrick currently is? I mean, don’t get me wrong, it’s just that I’ve played around with it a bit, and it has a few problems to still weed out.”
Instead, you throw hissyfits, and the above comes out your angry little fingers like this:
“Kubrick so fucking defect! I mean I tried installing it, and I couldn’t! It doesn’t work!”
StopWPCensorship: I wish I could start this sentence with “I’m sorry, but…”, but I can’t. Because I’m not sorry that I’m not taking you seriously. You actually parade around this forum antagonizing the devs and calling foul play left and right.
You should change your name to Teen Drama Queen, it would be more suitable. And then, you could roll up your sleeves and get to work instead of sitting in the back-seat of this free ride, telling people how to behave.
These forums would be a nicer place without all the fucking trolls and holier than thou attitudes.
Moose called this whole shebang an ego-fest, and that sure as hell is what it is. Get your heads out of your asses and concentrate on the topic at hand:
What is flawed about exchanging the current CSS and XHTML in WP with a variant of Kubrick.
Assume that all involved do their utmost to not worsen what currently exists.
I’m hella annoyed that I’m doing this in my working hours, just so as to not have more people ask, with crying voices: ‘where is the evidence?’ (I’d love to discuss design and usability with people, but not under these circumstances.
But even so, this is how I see Kubrick being integrated in WordPress just now:
First of all, it’s a good point that the default layout shouldn’t be reliant on Photoshop. Of course there is GiMP, but it’s quite frankly not a very intuitive program. So obviously it should be optional, meaning the default template should be as easily editable in CSS as possible.
Does that mean it shouldn’t be using images at all? I don’t know. I’m on the fence. On one hand I think it achieves aesthetics that are important in a) luring new users in, and b) in giving people a nice layout to start out on.
Some think that defaulting to a nice looking template means that people won’t be changing it, and that, that would drive us (the proverbial ‘us’) to become ‘like MT’, whatever that’s supposed to mean.
Personally I think that’s a flawed way of looking at things, and that the default MT template actually happens to be one of the plus things that MT has over WP.
Sure, content trumps aesthetics. But content can’t be bundled with WP, aesthetics can.
Then of course the inevitable discussion is bound to popup. Floating vs. fixed layout?! This is mostly a personal taste thing, and I know of several cool floating layouts, but I have always myself, preferred fixed width, for the simple reason that I often work on high-res setups, and I don’t want to bother with resizing my browser just to bring line-length down a notch.
If it were up to me, WP would ship with one of each.
Now, columns. Again, entirely a matter of personal preference. I always go for two or one, but that’s because I believe that three columns are inherently lazy. Take Matt’s site for instance. One column, and it’s not like I’m missing anything. Sure it’d be nice to have a way of seeing which entries have new comments, but then again, the comment ratio is probably too high for it to be efficient anyway.
As for my own, I have opted for two columns on the frontpage and on the main archive. For the frontpage I have been extremely selective about what I show in my column, opting only for what I know that I use every time I’m on my site, leaving all the bells and whistles for the archive page. This works great for me.
Three columns, the way I see it, and thus obviously what I think is right, are usually == clutter. They more easily allow for the on-layering of link groups, buttons to this or that and obscure information that IMO no one every reads anyway.
I prefer the bare essentials.
For this reason, I believe that the default WP layout should be two-columned, fixed and in a light-hearted, somewhat cheery color-scheme (and not the drab olive colored one that it current has).
I have talked to Matt about it, and I’m trying out some ideas for color combinations these days.
PS: As I see it, and this entirely my opinion (and I’m not a developer) you should not make the mistake of considering WordPress a community project. That’s not the case. It is still in the hands of a group of core developers, and while they are – as are we all – susceptible to outside influences, this is still their project. And they decide where it goes.
If you’re not happy with that, it’s GPL, so go ahead and fork it, and God be with you 🙂

Wee! Frames and Tables!

Whoa people, calm down.
First of all, I am quite interested in hearing your opinions. There are some good points, but you sure do come on hard over something that you hardly know any details about.
Currently this is in Matt’s lap, so he’s calling the shots. I’ve offered my assistance in whatever form he may want it.
As for Gemini and Trident, I hadn’t heard of them before just now, and having looked them over I’m sorry to say that I’m not particularly impressed. [flame removed.] Obviously I’m biased, but that’s where I stand anyway.
As for ‘every blog will look the same!’, that’s really no different than the way things are looking now. Except perhaps that the current style is scaring people away 🙂
As Zadu says, Photoshop isn’t needed to edit the image file, and if I can get away with it, I’ll of course also try and get the template file out in other formats.
Plugins, ‘proprietary code’ and such shenanigans are of course not going to be included, which is why I talked to Matt about retaining Kubrick as a separate template as well, for those interested in the full solution. And right now, nobody knows how much or how little is going to make it into the WordPress 1.3 distrib.
I have and continue to put a lot of time into Kubrick as well as the furthering of WordPress. I wish only the best for it.
So be patient and civil. And cheer up a little, we’re in this.

Join the club 😉