On Wed, Mar 16, 2005 at 05:28:47PM +0000, Jonathan Leighton wrote:
At the end of the day there's no definite answer about whether WordPress or the current way is easier; it all comes down to opinion.
This is exactly my take on it too. I know quite well that my own thoughts are just that, and that I may be completely in a minority, which is one of the reasons I hadn't said much until you actually requested my opinion. ;-)
I'd be interested to hear whether *you* think it's more difficult in WordPress or the current way, as you are the person who currently posts news.
I'm not sure my opinion on this one would be valid. Right now today, I can post using the current system *quite* quickly; my fingers are trained to go through the steps in a minimum number of keystrokes. To give you an idea, someone recently moved the news into a separate news.inc file, and I keep finding my fingers opening the index.html file before I know it. :-)
On the other hand, I have *not* used WordPress much, so when I tried it out, I spent a lot of extra time stumbling around, reading stuff, etc. that took time that an experienced user wouldn't. Thus, the fact that I can do it quicker with the current process right now is not really an accurate comparison, and I wouldn't make the decision based on that.
But that's sort of a lesser point in my mind anyway. As I mentioned before, the mechanics of posting the item take a minimal amount of time compared with the actual drafting of the news item, at least once you're up to speed with the tool.
A bigger consideration point for me is the administrative burden. There's not much to the current system; it's basically just plain old HTML. Of course, this means it has its faults - it doesn't automatically correct validation errors, doesn't do CSS, requires you to balance your tags, etc. - however simplicity also has its advantages. The current system has fairly few moving parts, so someone with basic knowledge of HTML, CSS, and PHP pretty much knows all they need to know to toubleshoot problems. Not everyone has these skills, but pretty much anyone who's done web development does, and in a project of our size, that's plenty of people. ;-)
I understand your concerns about modifying a database, however, I think perhaps the flexibility of editing relies more on the person *doing* the editing than the medium which is used to store the information. Personally I'd feel perfectly comfortable writing a script to make some global change in a database, but you, or somebody else, or Mr. Joe Average inkscape-develee may not be able to do that so easily because that might not be where their expertise and experience lies.
Don't get me wrong, I've done tons and tons of web/db development; I've written dozens of such apps. I myself would not have trouble fiddling db fields to make such changes. But I still find it more flexible to work on flat files in general. Linux has extremely good tools for working on flat text files, compared with for databases.
Therefore, on the basis of my offer above, I propose that we implement it and evaluate the usefulness of the system after a few months. If it's considered useful then we can stick with it, if not then I'll put us back to the current system. Ultimately it's up to you, Bryce, but I think that would give us a "win-win" situation where no-one should be any worse off if we *do* implement it.
Fair enough. I still think the current system is preferrable, but I definitely believe answers are best found through action not debate, and we've already had more than enough debate. ;-)
It will probably be hard to change my mind on this, but the types of things that I'll be looking at are: Do we see a large increase in the number and variety of people posting news items? Do we see any auxillary tools spring up? Does our news get greatly increased visibility on other sites? Does the quality of the news items increase noticeably? If these happen, I'll consider it proof that this tool is better.
By the way, one other note. SourceForge only provides a single database instance. We are not actually using it currently, but by using it for WordPress, that'll be the only db-based tool we'll be able to have on the site. I don't consider that a stopper issue, since we have no other plans for db tools, but wanted to make sure it was known.
Bryce