notthatugly

You will find this on 99% of blogs, no matter what software they are using, simply because of the way that blog archives are contructed. If you go to an archived post it nearly always uses the same template as the most recent posts. This is because most blogs software simply slots your text into the pre-designed template, rather than generating completely different pages for each entry. Most people then find it useful to have a link which will take you back to the most recent posts. The only way of doing this is to link to the index page.
If you have a problem with this there is nothing stopping you from removing the link back to the index page, or from abandoning blog software entirely and hand-coding each individual post. But I doubt your readers would thank you for it. Abiding by the conventions of blog design is not a bug.

Yes, a lot of weblogs suck and are boring. This is because a lot of people suck and are boring. I don’t argue with their right to exist and I’m not going to argue with the right of their weblogs to exist either, because a) I have access to a little grey box marked ‘x’ in the corner of my screen with which to combat the sucky boringness and b) apart from anything else (freedom of speech, self-expression, do what thou wilt and harm none etc. etc.) repeating truisms like ‘most weblogs suck and are boring’ is very boring.

From your admin menu, go to ‘Options’ and then ‘Other Options’. You’ll find the default settings there. Change the date format to however you want your archives displayed (oh! they’ve added a link to the php date formats in 1.0. That makes me happy.)

So I re-checked the wiki, and it actually says the_excerpt (so the_extract was never going to work ?? ).
oh well, at least nobody else noticed my stupidity.

A couple more advantages of WordPress:
– Ease of installation. I know I found the prospect of installing MT very daunting, but with WordPress you just need to upload everything, chmod one file (optional) and run the install script.
– Fewer templates to configure. You have index.php and your comments page, and that’s basically it. Most of the minor aspects of your blog’s appearance (like how archives are displayed) are controlled through parameters in your template tags.
– Ability to password-protect individual posts. I don’t use this myself, but I know people who’ve installed an MT hack to do the same thing.
That said, I’d expand on your first two stated advantages of MT: basically it’s been around for longer so the knowledge base is larger. WP documentation is still very rough around the edges compared to MT, though we have a dedicated team of users at work on it.
And, in response to your specific queries: WordPress has tags for previous and next entries, though I don’t know whether your current numbered page setup would be achievable. According to the wiki, post counts per category can be displayed in the sidebar. Showing an extract from the post ought be possible, since there’s an ‘extract’ field which can be configured to default to the first [x] words in a post, but I’m still trying to figure out how to call it. You’d probably need a hack to do the same thing for comments.
Hope that helps ??

The value of css goes not much further than design separation and prettiness.

I’d say that goes a pretty long way already. Separation of form and content is crucial for accessibility purposes as well as making sites easier to tweak and maintain. As for ‘prettiness’, what on earth is wrong with that? Far too many people confuse usability with unattractiveness.

I know it’s possible in MT, because a group blog I post to uses it.
Anyone?

Possibly; I’ve never changed them myself because I blog in English. The only reason I can think of for changing the months in wp-config-extra is if you need to translate them into another language.

A list of known issues with 1.0 (including yours) is here.

I think he’s using inarticulacy as a rhetorical device for comic effect.

That isn’t “turning off the list”, it is showing a list in a different way. I imagine it wasn’t mentioned because the primary request was to “turn off links”.

My mistake. When you said there was ‘a parameter for list/no list’ that confused me. I assumed that ‘no list’ meant not displaying the links as a list. (I tend to use ‘list’ in its narrowly technical HTML sense; as far as HTML is concerned, if it’s not

,
or <dl> it’s not a list). And there have been more posts about the
issue than the links, so I was surprised it hadn’t popped up on any of those threads. But then, only a handful of people have access to this kind of information, so maybe I shouldn’t be.

Yes, you can change wp-admin.css all you like (even change the html if you know what you’re doing, though that’s a little too much work for me). I made my own css for the .72 backend and it really wasn’t that hard.
Wasn’t somebody working on a b2-style interface?

I’m using a simple PHP script from here; very basic but it does what I need it to.

Sorry, but in b2 (and in 0.72, for that matter) it was possible to show category names that were neither a link nor a list, so that people had the ability to choose how they wanted the category displayed. That functionality now appears to have been removed, so that it’s now necessary to edit the php files or tinker with the CSS. You might not like me pointing that out (I know the developers are trying to move away from the perception of WordPress as a b2 fork) but I wouldn’t bother giving you feedback if I didn’t care about the success of the project.
If I get stroppy sometimes (ok, a lot of the time ?? ) it’s because I see a potentially great project being undermined by an occasional disregard of the needs/wants of the average, non-PHP-or-CSS-expert end user, and that frustrates me because I’d like to see WordPress get bigger, not smaller.

ah, if we had the_category_name it would be simple:
.php”><?php the_category_name ()?>
(sorry to bring this up again, but if you don’t ask you don’t get, right? ?? )