Why WordPress is So Popular In Spite of Itself

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I got an email from Sitepoint this morning the subject line of which was “Why is WordPress So Popular?” I was intrigued so I opened it (I open most of their email, actually…great group!). Turned out the topic wasn’t WordPress per se but a book they published on building WordPress themes.

But the question was intriguing anyway so I thought about it for a bit. There are a lot of things to like about WordPress. But I have a hard time with people who think it’s the Ultimate Web Development Panacea. In reality, it’s a very good content management system augmented by tons of well-designed plug-ins that enable you to cobble together something relatively usable with relatively little programming effort. But like all such tools of which I’m aware, it has huge walls at some points. For example, changing not just the UI but the UX is very challenging for most WP users and designers (though somewhat less so for developers). If you need custom DB access in, e.g., a Web app, WP is not likely to be easy to bend to your will.
But I digress.
The singular most important advantage I think WordPress has over its competitors from a technology perspective is its high level of granularity. It is so relatively easy to add major chunks of functionality to your site with plug-ins. For example, eCommerce, full-blown membership site infrastructure, and a few dozen other such things are ready to drop in. They integrate nicely and for the most part relatively easily. If you want or need to custom-tailor them, that’s sometimes a real challenge.
For my money, though, I’m still using NOLOH for everything except heavily CMS-driven sites and I’ll soon be using NOLOH for those, too. It’s a matter of waiting for the NOLOH development team to put together some good editors for their in-place-editing CMS model, which I find vastly superior to and more efficient than the wizard-driven editor approach of WP and other CMSes. No walls. Growing community (though it will probably never be as big as WP’s, which is the latter’s other big advantage).

Posted via email from danshafer’s posterous

August 31, 2010 · Posted in Web technology  
　　　　

Office2HD: Finally, Edit Google Docs on Your iPad!

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I have come to really like my iPad. Even though I was at first skeptical about its real utility, I have nonetheless become somewhat enamored of things like its immediate availabtility, immersive user experience, and wonderful screen quality. And I've found a few really useful apps, including replacing my Kindle2 with my iPad and the Kindle app.

Still, there has been one massive hole in the app scene without which I could not declare the iPad a suitable productivity tool: a way to create and edit Google Docs (and as a nice bonus, work with documents in my Dropbox account).

That gap seems to have slammed shut with the recent release of a highly usable version of Office2 HD from byteSquared.

I’ve written this review by starting it out on my iPad using Office2 HD, saving it locally, then moving it to my gDocs directory, opening it and editing some more. Then I saved it on gDocs and went back to the iPad to load the revised version. It all flowed quite smoothly.

Then I tried moving the document from the local Office2 directory to my Dropbox on my iPad. That, too, went flawlessly in both directions. You can either move or copy files to and from all of these sources. If, e.g., I move a document from gDocs to my local files on my iPad, the file disappears from gDocs. I can then edit it in Office2, then save it to any of the three locations: back in gDocs, over to Dropbox or locally.

The basic word processor in Office2 seems quite capable. Though it only supports commands for font and size and formatting for bold, italic, underlined, color, highlight and alignment, it does those things quite smoothly and efficiently.

I've hooked up an Apple Wireless Keyboardn to the iPad (something I had no reason to do before) and turned my iPad into a highy useful portable document editor. It is capable of editing formatted text documents and spreadsheet files within some limits but I'm sure that the program will continue to evolve.

One thing you do have to be careful about is to keep track of where the version of the document you are now editing is stored. If you press the iPad Home button in mid-edit, you're fine as long as the document is on your local file system. But if it's stored remotely, you lose all unsaved edits by doing that. I recommend always copying or moving the document from the remote server to the local iPad and editing it there, then saving it back when finished. It's a couple of extra steps but the security will be worth it.

I did document one apparent bug. If you have a local document saved and you want to move it to Dropbox, and a document of the same name already appears in DropBox, the file fails to save silently, leaving the old, presumably obsolete document in place on the Dropbox server. This is particularly problematic because the iPad version of the Dropbox app does not allow you to delete items. Ouch.

At $7.99, though, Office2 HD is a real bargain. Highly recommended.

Posted via email from danshafer's posterous

August 2, 2010 · Posted in General  
　　　　

Maybe Post Formatting is WordPress’ Fault, Not Posterous

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I've posted a couple of comments here in recent weeks griping about the fact that when I use email to post to my blog via Posterous, formatting gets munged. In almost all cases, e.g.,. the blank line between the first and second paragraphs gets eliminated. I know that's probably not a big deal to more than a handful of folks on the planet, but for better or for worse, I've spent so much of my life as a professional writer and publisher, that the formatting errors just bug me.

This morning I decided to probe more deeply into what's going on and I'm now convinced the problem is with WordPress or perhaps the editor I'm using in WordPress. I haven't seen this post yet, of course, because I'm drafting it in email, but the immediately preceding post about the Democrats and God was my case in point.

When I posted it, there was a one-sentence first paragraph that just cited the New York Times article. When the post appeared on my blog here, the blank line was gone, though there was a line break at the end of the short first paragraph. So I went into my WordPress Dashboard, edited the post and inserted a carriage return into the WYSIWYG editor. I updated the post and checked it. No change (yep, I refreshed the browser). I re-edited the post, this time using the editor's HTML view. I entered explicit paragraph tags for the second and third paragraphs, updated the post, viewed it in my browser. No change. I wondered if the problem was with the Safari WebKit rendering engine, so I looked at the post in Firefox. Same problem. 

I re-opened the post in HTML view in Safari and imagine my surprise when the two paragraph tag pairs I'd entered at the last step were gone! I replaced them, updated the post, and then re-opened the post for edit to be sure the tags were still there. They were.

Now, I'll allow for the possibility that some of this may be due to my upgrade to WordPress 3.0, but I'm skeptical since I was experiencing these issues long before the upgrade. I had begun using Dean's FCKEditor to replace WordPress' built-in editor but that plugin appears not to have been updated to work with the new WordPress.

All of this really serves to illustrate my long-stading reluctance to introduce seams into my workflow. Here, I'm passing an email to Posterous, which is updating my blog, so I have two seams (email-to-Posterous and Posterous-to-WordPress) to cross. Seams are just places for things to go wrong and get lost. I don't want to give up on Posterous, particularly if WordPress is the issue, but I cannot afford to make yet another blog switch; every time I do, I lose audience share.

Posted via email from danshafer’s posterous

July 3, 2010 · Posted in Web technology  
　　　　

iPhone 4 and iOS4 Sound Like Strong Products, But AT&T?

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I just finished listening to and reading blog entries and tweets about Steve Jobs' keynote at the Apple Worldwide Developers Conference.(Check out this video for a quick, slick take.) As expected, he focused his keynote entirely on the new iPhone 4, due out June 25, and on its iOS4 (the newly renamed iPhone OS) that will be the platform for the iPhone as well as iPad and iPod Touch. The new products look like very strong offerings with some great new features (over 100 of them accessible to developers in more than 1500 APIs).

I was particularly drawn to the new form factor (razor-thin with glass on both sides) and some of the new features (muilti-tasking; two cameras, one of them front facing; WiFi video chat; the ability to create folders; even sharper display). Some of the sexier stuff isn't really useful to me. I don't take or edit videos, though I admit being impressed that the new iOS4 includes the ability to do in-app video editing right on the device. Video chat will be quite cool, but it's limited to iOS4 devices which I gather means even Macs won't be able to participate (which seems odd somehow given Apple's pioneering in that area). 

While I'm not sure this was meaningful, I could swear I heard Steve make an indirect allusion to expanding their service beyond AT&T. He said the video chat will initially be wireless only "for the rest of 2010" because (and here I'm not 100% sure I'm right) Apple has to work with the cell vendors to get G3 ready for that service. I hope he meant we'd get a choice of cell vendors at some point because I'd much prefer Verizon in my area. (During his keynote, for most of the presentation, Steve couldn't access the Internet from the new iPhone 4. Turned out it was because several hundred of the developers attending the conference had WiFi base stations running in the same room and the AT&T cell towers couldn't handle it. That's an unexpectedly huge load, but I'm sure more than a few developers were muttering what one yelled: "Get Verizon!")

I'll definitely order my upgrade. My service plan with AT&T has gone past its two years so I qualify for the lower-cost upgrade. I have a feeling I'm going to be happy I didn't leap on the 3GS bandwagon. 

Posted via email from danshafer’s posterous

June 7, 2010 · Posted in Technology  
　　　　

NOLOH Gets Cover of PHP Architect

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My all-time favorite Web app development technology, NOLOH (Not One Line Of HTML) snagged the main cover article in the just-released edition of the print and online magazine PHP Architect. The article was written by NOLOH's lead developers, Asher Snyder and Phil Ross and it provides a very good overview of why I love NOLOH and why you should check it out if you're in the Web app space.

Unfortunately, the magazine editor took a few liberties that resulted in some small amount of  confusion in the piece; hopefully they'll get a chance to straighten that out soon. But even with those minor flaws, this piece ought to impress you with the power and scope of NOLOH.

The issue costs $4.99 but it's worth it just for the NOLOH piece and there are a couple of other good articles in the issue as well.

Posted via email from danshafer’s posterous

June 3, 2010 · Posted in General  
　　　　

HTML5 Video Issues Clarified by Someone Who Knows

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The inventor of the JW Player posted a cogent and clear article yesterday about the HTML5 vs. Flash wars that are raging among Internet video developers and enthusiasts.

Not only are his comments easy to understand, some of the comments are by people who are heavily engaged in and/or closely monitoring the standardization processes going on now.

I recommend this very authoritative piece if you want a short read that brings you the key facts in a digestible form.

Posted via email from danshafer’s posterous

May 27, 2010 · Posted in General  
　　　　

Shafer Walters Group Blog Now Open at Posterous

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My business partner Chipp Walters and I have just opened a new blog at Posterous where we'll both hold forth primarily on Web and software application design and related issues. Soon, we'll have an FB page and other places you can reach as as well. But for now, our new blog is open and available for your viewing pleasure and subscription here.

Posted via email from Shafer Walters Group

April 17, 2010 · Posted in General  
　　　　

No IE9 for WinXP is Sneaky Strategy by Microsoft

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According to a throw-away sentence in an article in the Seattle Times a few days ago, Microsoft does not plan to offer Internet Explorer 9 for users of its Windows XP operating system.

The article covers Microsoft's commitment to implement HTML5 in the next release of its popular browser, a move welcomed by all Web developers, albeit with a bit of skepticism born of the Redmond, WA, company's many previous pronouncements about its plan to adhere to standards that have not always come to full fruition. But by omitting an IE9 release for Windows XP, Microsoft would appear to be attempting to force more and more of its user base to upgrade to Windows 7. Migration has been a good bit slower than Microsoft would have liked but its user base is still nursing badly scorched fingers from the company's unfortunate foray into Windows Vista, the worst Microsoft OS since Windows.me.

This is Microsoft giving with one hand and taking away with the other. The good news: we'll support HTML5 on IE9. The bad news: it will only work on Win7 and later. That means a huge percentage of Web surfers will still have a less-than-optimal online experience thanks to Microsoft's stubbornness. And that's just wrong.

Posted via email from danshafer’s posterous

March 27, 2010 · Posted in Technology  
　　　　

WebApps for iPhone Have Their Own Directory at Apple

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Everyone knows about Apple's iPhone App Store. And everyone probably has at least one opinion about it. I know I do.

But I have been saying for some time that I think standalone apps will become the second-largest type of software available for and used on the iPhone and other smart handhelds, behind Web Apps written in HTML and using CSS and JavaScript. I don't know how many Web Apps exist for the iPhone. And of course many Web Apps not specifically targeted at smartphones will run just fine on the iPhone's Safari browser. You need only make sure your Web App can adapt itself to the iPhone (and/or other smartphone) UI constraints (screen size, no rollovers, etc.) to deploy software for the exploding iPhone (and, soon, iPad) platform.

If you want to get an idea how big and diverse the marketplace for iPhone Web Apps is, check out Apple's directory.

I'm going to be doing more reporting on this topic in coming days as I explore it for a client and for my own interest. Stay tuned.

Posted via email from danshafer’s posterous

March 27, 2010 · Posted in Technology  
　　　　

Another NOLOH Blogger Talks JavaScript-Free AJAX

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A UK blogger named Gary Wynne, who's been working with NOLOH for over a year, has started a new blog about our mutually favorite Web app development tool. This one focuses on how easy it is to get into the habit of writing sexy AJAX user experience code without a single line of JavaScript, all within the NOLOH language syntax. Very cool.

I've been doing a lot of thinking lately about the whole Web App development space. It's clear to me that the coming move to HTML5, which is already farther along than most folks who aren't hard-core developers realize, is going to change things in very fundamental ways. One thing that it portends is the ability with the right development tools to create Web apps that look and behave properly on desktop browsers and on handheld/smartphone browsers. How do I get there with the least friction?

I'm counting on my friends at NOLOH to solve this for me. And I'm betting that they will. Reading Gary's AJAX piece and reflecting on how much I can get done in NOLOH without writing anything but NOLOH code has further convinced me I'm betting on the right horse here. Even though Smalltalk remains my favorite language and even though it is true that for my personal Web projects I can choose any tool I like, I'm leaning strongly in the direction of staying with NOLOH. I figure if they can implement AJAX fluidity as absolutely painlessly as they have, they can make whatever I want or need to do pretty accessible.

Plus, I have the lead developers' home number. :-)

Posted via email from danshafer’s posterous

February 24, 2010 · Posted in Web technology  
　　　　

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