The Scrolls

Posts Tagged ‘wordpress’

Congrats WordPress, Now Get to Work

I’m feeling a bit better today, good enough that I cracked a smile when I signed into my dashboard to see this from the WP Development blog: WordPress Wins CMS Award. Let me say I don’t want to fail to recognize the hard work that has gone into this script which makes my life easier and has always been free. Free is important and so is easy. WordPress is a wonderful blogging script, no doubt. But I think it might be a little premature to award its CMS abilities.

A while back I wrote a post entitled “WordPress Sucks as a CMS.” It’s a pretty popular post when it comes to spam; a good portion of spam comments are left there, probably because it used two very hot keywords: WordPress and CMS. If you missed it, let me sum it up: page management is awful. And it really is. If you’re using WordPress for more than a dozen pages, in addition to posts, you’ll probably agree with my complaints.

I haven’t gotten a lot of other feedback because I feel my demands are higher than your average blog owner. However, they’re probably pretty tame in comparison to others who are using WP as a content management system. I simply want to be able to edit my pages without such a headache. To their credit, many folks have stepped in to create plugins which do help with this but it’s still not perfect. Plus, I feel that most of these functionalities should already be built into WP if it wants to be a serious CMS contender.

With that said, here is what I want to see WP folks:

Sortability

Currently, the pages are shown by order, if specified, with all private pages showing first. If no order is specified by the user, pages are ordered by ID (creation date). If there are child pages, they are shown after the parent page, before the next parent page which is shown by order/ID. I have 29 pages of.. pages and there is no way to adjust how many I see or how they are sorted, even though name and modification date are both shown. Furthermore, there is no easy way to view child or parent pages. To me, all of these things should already have been built in the system a long time ago. Right now, I use a plugin called pageMash which let’s me do something of these things but it’s not flush with WP’s dashboard or as complete as I want.

True AutoP Control

Again, I have to use a plugin to get rid of the paragraph tags that WP inserts, which break my code and make my site invalid. While WP Unformatted is a lifesaver, I don’t think I should have to install a plugin when a checkbox should suffice. This would aid in posts, too, but I mainly run into the AutoP issue when working with HTML code on pages.

Page Importing

I recently added yet another plugin which allows me to add batch pages (and it’s not the only plugin intended to convert a site to WP) after converting them to spreadsheet-like form. The plugin isn’t perfect and the process needs to be done carefully, especially when it comes to content containing HTML but it would be great if WordPress included a way for people to import content from their old sites, you know, instead of just copying and pasting.

Full Searchability

Quite simply put, the ability to search everything (not just posts), is a must. Pages are no less important.

One small step for man; a slightly bigger step for Cole

I just figured out a way to assign my dynamic sidebars for each section a little better/easier/simpler than how I was doing it before. I was also able to delete 4 or so template files. All in all? Not a miracle or anything but it took a little experimentation and I’m quite proud!

Essentially, instead of calling one sidebar in all places, I ask it to call a sidebar for a page and all its children like so:

<?php

if ( is_page(‘pagename’) || $post->post_parent == ‘parentid’) {

get_sidebar(‘sidebar’);

} elseif (is_page(‘page2name’) || $post->post_parent == ‘parent2id’) {

get_sidebar(‘sidebar2′);

} else {

get_sidebar();

}
?>

Happy Friday the 13th

Another WordPress update? Really? I mean, updates are good and all, so is a secure script, but sometimes it feels like overkill. It’s the same thing with Filezilla. Every time I open it, it needs to update. Can’t they just give me a bigger update every other time I open it?

Anyway, I’ve never seen the movie but have always felt sympathy for Jason.

WordPress Sucks as a CMS

No, really, it does. And here’s why:

Page management is horrible if you have more than 20 pages on your site (and I realize that WordPress is normally used solely for blogging and most bloggers don’t have more than 20 pages). There is no way to easily import pages – copy pasta, it is. The “Edit Pages” section within the dashboard becomes useless because you have to click from one page to the next, without being able to change the order of your pages (by name or date would be nice, for example) or how many pages you see listed. It’s always 20.

And if you’re wondering how order is determined, drafts and private pages are listed first then publish pages are listed by “Order” which you can specify on the individual pages. This also determines how pages show up in your page list on the site. For instance, I have ordered my pages in this sequence: Me, Content, Site, Links, Joined. So the pages show up in that order in the dashboard which kind of makes sense – until you add in the subpages. So after my drafts, I see “Me” then all of its subpages, then “Content”, then all of its subpages so on and so forth. The problem is that each of my parent pages has as least 20 subpages and some of my subpages have subpages (up to 3 deep!) and since there is no way to view only one parent and its subpages, the list is broken up over several pages. Finding a specific page in that mess? Means paging through the list until I get lucky.

So if I add or edit a page and forget to do something, finding it in the list is horrible. I could use the “Search” bar in the dashboard but it’s really weak. I can view the live page and edit from there, if it’s published but it definitely takes more time. In matters of converting and editing pages, it’s definitely easier to have hard coded pages and use FTP, even if it takes a little longer to navigate through the directories.

Of course, you can’t use widgets that way. Or apply plug-ins. So while I might have a plug-in for forms with WordPress, I need another script to do the same thing with hard coded pages. You start to feel like you have a lot of duplicate scripts running. Furthermore, sometimes WordPress plugins do things that is much harder to automated with hard coded pages (I’m thinking of an SEO plugin I have). And the dynamics of WordPress are really nice when working with pages. Being able to edit pages from anywhere, without needing an FTP client installed is awesome, too. WordPress has made it possible to do things I never would have considered before and easier to do things that have always been a page – just not with pages.

And that is why WordPress sucks as a CMS. I still love it for blogging, though.

What’s Going On

On my review blog, I touched on the frustrations I was experiencing because of my previous host (Neureal/EMC) and while it was only bothersome at that point, it has now become simply unacceptable.

In the last week, a few people noticed that my site was not loading and I contacted them. There was some strange error but it was fixed within a day at most. However, my site and e-mail were down, once again, several days ago. Upon contacting them I was told (again) that the control panel software was no longer supported by the creator and, now, there was some sort of corruption which made files on that server inaccessible.

Since then they have been “working” on it. I gave them some time but already knew I would be looking for a new host and I began my hunt, spending a lot of time perusing the WebHostingTalk forums. About a day passed and I received an e-mail message (the fiust time I didn’t actually have to contact them about my site being down) which said they would need 12 more hours and I could check their support desk site for updates. At that point, it was at 79%.

More than 24 hours later, the status is only at 87%. In the meantime, I settled on trying Steadfast hosting which had a lot of praise and uses the same control panel. I switched over DNS info and my domain propogated pretty quickly.

I was going to just start with a fresh install of WordPress but recalled I had a backup of the WordPress database in my e-mail so I uploaded -most- of my posts. However, about a month of posts are missing and there are some formatting issues. Hopefully I’ll have that all squared away tonight and then all I need to do is wait for my files to be accessible, grab them and cancel hosting with my previous host.