MT Migration and philosophical musing

Aiiight! That is AWESOME. Thanks!
I can’t believe somebody responded so quickly with something so helpful.

Thats a good example of why this project seems to be doing well, good support from the developers, and the community. Your code can be good or bad, but a project lives or dies based on the quality of the support community. Fortunately in this case, the code is pretty good too.

dj –
That was a rather lengthy post. How about giving specific examples? That would help a lot!
I think the developers have done a good job at continuing to forward the usability for the average blogger, but if you have certain things you find ‘lacking’, post specifics! We might know an answer already to a question you have, or it might spark a thought in someone’s head of potential direction/solution. ??
-d

You might want to install WP 1.2. Putting categories in lists is plain semantic mark up. How would you like them.?

I would like to have the control over them from the web-based interface to use the tags as I want. I shouldn’t have to dig around in files to get the tags to display how I’d like.
When I invoke a tag, I shouldn’t be surprised by what I get. There are a few other spots in WordPress that suffer from hidden markup.
I have a project that I’m using to learn WordPress. For this project, I had used Movable Type, which I handle categories this way (with my code for one project, but spans/divs could be different:

<div class="category"><$MTEntryCategory$></div><br>
<div class="headline"><$MTEntryTitle$></div>
<div class="dek"><$MTEntryExcerpt$></div>
<$MTEntryBody$>

I know that all I’m going to get is the category for the entry being shown, the title of the entry and the excerpt of the entry. The only markup is mine. I own it and can troubleshoot it. There is no hidden CSS or PHP or anything that will be put in the rendered page. I like this functionality (Yes, I know that PHP is more powerful and can do all kinds of things). It’s simple and straightforward and allows me to style the code without knowing or caring about PERL, CGI or the code behind the CMS. It’s this ease of use that I’m hoping for in a CMS. It makes development faster and easier and down the road, when I become more adept, then I can start with the crazy PHP includes.
Thanks for wading through my long-windedness.
Does any of this make sense??

p.s. I have installed 1.2 and there are some GREAT improvements. However, on my host, if I don’t have wp installed in my public_html folder (no subfolder for wp) it doesn’t work. .htaccess or not, it just doesn’t work. I’m certain it’s a host thing, and no big whoop, but that cost me several hours of troubleshooting.
Also, I’m aware that the code used in how categories were treated in 1.02 is semantic markup. To be clear: That markup and the control of it is HIDDEN from me as a user. I don’t like that. It means that what I see in my edit window in the interface is not a true representation of what is output. There is sorcery going on behind the scenes and I have to dig to find out it’s origin.
My feeling is that while this works for the code buddies, it does not work so well for the designer/front end person doing a site or two or seven and wanting to use a CMS. It’s cool and awesome that PHP can throw in whatever tags, it’s not cool that as an evaluator of the software, I have to spend time on the boards, rather than spending time making my site awesome.
I think a more straightforward approach to tags, CSS would broaden the appeal of Word Press and make it so the developers spend less time answering long-winded nutjobs such as myself and more time making WordPress even better than it already is.
I’m long winded because I’m trying to get a point across: I’m not a programmer and don’t want to be. I’m a writer/designer. The tools I love have a respect for where I’m coming from and play to my strengths; they don’t show my weakness (or the assumptions of the developers).
And finally: I’m writing all of this, because I believe in free software. I just think most of it is written for gearheads and not for my grandma. And that is the greatest shortcoming of free. I want to use WordPress and evangelize the hell out of it; not because it’s free, but because it’s AMAZING.
Thanks for your patience with these rants. I’ve installed WordPress three times in the past two days and re-imported 3 times and edited CSS and the template for many many hours and it’s apparent after this exercise that I had to say something, rather than just walk away.

Well I have to say, and making all due allowances for a little unfamiliarity with the system, I have yet to find any html thrown up by WP that can’t be styled. The epiphany will come. And when it does your design world will change.

I have to agree with dj blurb on this. I’m using a cms to catalog updates and news on an archive site so don’t need many that features but was going to upgrade from blogger to movable type due to categories (I was using movable type on a personal blog). I thought I’d give wordpress a try due to MT licensing and the nice subcategory implementation.
The site already has layout, navigation, a style sheet, content, etc.. this isn’t going to be the “backbone” of it in any way. I don’t need/want comments/blogroll/calendar etc. So I linked it over to the current css file and cut out unnecessary divs and php calls. Much to my frustration it doesn’t display vanilla… I have to use css to display: inline; to adjust for the lists in category, certain tags have line breaks built in and others don’t. Ideally it should be a jumbled one line mess and then I can easily put in line breaks etc where I want them to be. It seems counterproductive to have to add in css to negate effects that aren’t intuitively there. These things can be styled out of course, the question is should they have to be?
erutan

I have just started looking at WP as an alternative to MT, and this might be one issue that would make me hesitate.
If I understand things correctly, WP applies some markup to the code it generates apart from what is found in the supplied CSS file, rather than just generating ‘plain’ tags without any markup at all?
Or am I misunderstanding what’s discussed? ??

The category “problem” was introduced when we added support for multiple categories. Before that the tag simply echoed out. If you add a single argument to the tag (the_category(',')) it will output the list as a comma-separated string. Thanks for your feedback, keep it coming. Specific examples help.

I figured out the comments tag thing via looking in the wiki, much easier to edit that than worrying about the inline which gets rid of the li’s but still has it indented. I was pretty startled when they popped up. As to the person who is hesitating on this… things aren’t as dire as my post made them to be for the most part it doesn’t seem any more intrusive than other cms / weblog solutions, the category case was special. ??
After viewing source the “line breaks” were caused by the p tag generated around the “content” and some /div tags, not hr’s, sorry about the sloppy talking. Blogger is very stupid about autoformatting which I enjoyed, the site I use MT on is a very ‘weblog’ looking site so I don’t mind the little autoformatting it does (though that can apparently be turned off).
This is related to my prior post but probably should be in the troubleshooting forum… anyways, is it possible to generate the date, content, and author nick/category within the same paragraph? ie would it be possible to generate a short little update listing like:
2003-10-01 > More information about the U2 Go Home (Slane Castle) DVD release is included in our discography entry for this U2 release. Included is information about the possible limited and the regular versions planned for this U2 DVD release. [AJ – Site:Discography]
or at least have the content and author/cat tags nested in the same p? ie:
2003-10-01
————-
More information about the U2 Go Home (Slane Castle) DVD release is included in our discography entry for this U2 release. Included is information about the possible limited and the regular versions planned for this U2 DVD release. [AJ – Site:Discography]
I realize this is a somewhat odd use for a cms, but it beats having to manually update and create archives, make sure someone isn’t overwriting a file altered by another etc.
erutan

Now we are getting near what this thread is really about. It is the old favourite – items in lists. This is a really common practice now (well at least amongst up to date coders ?? ) and offers fabulous advantages for subsequent styling or even unstyling. We wouldn’t have it any other way (assuming we ever had a choice).
Wp not only serves up valid xhtml (which incidentally br is not) it serves up semantic and well presented markup for any styling we want. I say this in the nicest way : It must be a wrench leaving MT. OK. But looking backwards can sometimes cloud a true appreciation of what WP really does. I don’t think any of us have ever found anything which isn’t done for a very good reason.

I learned html a bit before IE 3.02 was released… got out of it for a few years afterwards. I know how to do what I want with css, etc but don’t consider myself an up-to-date coder. I have no problem with the listing format for category now that I can adapt to it (this format is obviously nice for the sidebar etc) but don’t like paragraphs being forced though there may be some wondrous backend reason for this. I thought
was a valid tag?
erutan

my god you’re long winded. You could have said it all in 1/10 as many words. Embrace brevity. It is your friend.

Phidauex-
The problem with including uncoded whitespacing in the HTML output is that you couldn’t get rid of it if you didn’t want it there. For example, I might want my post line to have the entry title and then the category. I should be able to control what goes in between without having to hack the program. The way it works now, it’s great. If I want a new paragraph, or a div, or a span, or whatever, around or between any elements, I’m free to insert that. I can’t see why you would want to hard-code something like that, as it would greatly hamper customization.
Also, if you don’t like the list output, it’s very easy to use CSS to make it appear normal. Here’s how I did it for the META section of the links bar, which I didn’t want to appear in bulleted fashion:
.meta ul {
display: inline;
margin: 0;
padding: 0;
list-style: none;
}
To see the results, visit https://www.radicalcongruency.com