Yet Another Cycling Forum
General Category => The Knowledge => Ctrl-Alt-Del => Topic started by: Jaded on 14 March, 2021, 07:31:46 pm
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I log into a Wordpress site and marvel at the abject confusion.
I read up a bit and discovered that Wordpress has two personae and stuff can be in one or another. Blog or Pages, from what I remember.
Is it unintuitive?
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Having a clear idea of what you want from what you're building will probably help, regardless of what platform you end up using: generally blog posts for things that are located in time (events, diary/news items) and pages for the more static stuff (about, contact, team pages, project indexes, things that keep the same relevance as time passes...)
Regarding the two personae: wordpress.org requires you to have your own server access, and you can tweak things a lot more as a result. Wordpress.com sits on their servers, you can customise things less but can still change theme options and how you organise the content on your site. Have a play with a wordpress.com site set to private whilst you figure out structure, content and your voice.
I started using it around 2004 sort of time and have had no reason to move away. I use it for my own projects, short-term schools projects, documenting commissions etc. I like how you can always get your content out of it should you choose to relocate. The writing interface is getting more annoying though (there are plug-ins to revert back to the old interface if you're using wordpress.org)
If you're doing e-commerce stuff then it might, er, pay to do your research about how to link different platforms up for money and sales handling.
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Thanks.
I've been tasked with updating some info on someone else's site. I'm sure a better familiarity would help, but I'm used to Concrete5, (which I chose because it seemed more intuitive than other CMS software!)
I've managed to get a new item up and appearing in the right place, but I can't find anywhere how to edit the footer of the pages. Not critical, just annoying!
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It's a blogging engine (a very elderly one) with a load of other bits sellotaped on.
I've managed to get a new item up and appearing in the right place, but I can't find anywhere how to edit the footer of the pages. Not critical, just annoying!
Many things on Wordpress require hacking PHP templates.
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Oh dear.
I dislike doing that!
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Also depends on what theme you are using. Some are a bit of a mess, or out of date.
And some are easy to customise, others require more hacking. Maybe easier to find a new theme that works the way you want.
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Can I ask why you’ve been tasked with this update, if Wordpress isn’t your area of expertise?
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I think that answers the question nicely, thanks. ;D ;D
The whole point of a CMS is to manage content, not to create a nice little industry that needs people whose area of expertise it is!
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ALL CMSs are shit. Their whole purpose is to farm jobs out to people who have no idea what theyre doing, they lead to html and javascript being stored in database tables, and baby animals die every time pages are served by them. Should be rounded up and burnt.
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Is this why all computer programming is done in machine code ???
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Is this why all computer programming is done in machine code ???
CMSs theoretically have their place in the world if they are used 100% correctly but in practice they always get used wrong.
So if you implement it yourself you are either the sole person on it or you are getting other people to work on it.
If you are the only one, you have no reason to use a CMS in the first place, but as soon as you introduce others, you can guarantee at least one of them will use it wrong.
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You mean like pretty much every piece of software or operating system there is.
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That's what we get for not doing it all in machine code.
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I write out all my HTTP responses by hand.
Some users notice a delay, but they all appreciate the personalised service.
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I have a person called Terry Christopher Peterson who puts all my http responses in little brown packets and ensures they get delivered. The personal http responses was okay to start but they started making more requests.
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Are there actually people who don't hand-cruft all their HTML :o
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Are there actually people who don't hand-cruft all their HTML :o
Well sometimes The Mgt have decreed that a CMS will be used...
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I write out all my HTTP responses by hand.
Some users notice a delay, but they all appreciate the personalised service.
HTTP Server error 512: Quill requires trimming
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I've managed to get a new item up and appearing in the right place, but I can't find anywhere how to edit the footer of the pages. Not critical, just annoying!
Another WP hater here, but I am lumbered with maintaining three sites which use it. Jaded, try looking at the widgets. They seem to control rather more of the display than the name might suggest.
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Yep, Wordpress is crap - very inflexible.
As a long-term CMS user (since 2005) I have used Joomla for a long time - it's powerful, intuitive, runs on industry standard software and very flexible. Loads and loads of components for almost any function or requirement you might want, and lots of them are free or very low-cost. Learning curve isn't steep - the whole thing is very logical. The reach on sites is massive with a number of global names running their sites in Joomla
BUT as with any web presence starting out with a plan is a good idea in order to make sure you build the structure that you need now and hopefully the future needs too.
My www.cycle-endtoend.org.uk website is Joomla - it's simple which suits me as a the manager, and my audience that wants resource and information.
.... if anyone mentions Drupal as a CMS - shoot them immediately. It's awaful, worse than WP
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if anyone mentions Drupal as a CMS - shoot them immediately. It's awaful, worse than WP
I'm glad you said that. I tried Drupal some years ago when several people recommended it to me, but I really didn't get on with it - but I assumed I was the problem, not Drupal. I've not tried Joomla.
I have to use Wordpress every day for work and I find it pretty clunky, though I've got used to a lot of its quirks. The site predates me being with the company but I think it was created for us by some consultant who most likely made us pay him an obscene amount of money for the privilege of being given that pile of shit, before boarding his private jet to the Caribbean, never to be seen again.
Fortunately, I only have to use it for adding/editing new posts, rather than pages, and it's mostly fine for that. When things go wrong (which is often), it's not my job to fix them.
I also have a personal WP.com site that is really just a small collection of static pages that don't need much maintenance, they just sit there as an information resource. It's perfectly adequate for that purpose. And, most importantly, free.
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That's what we get for not doing it all in machine code.
I may have used similar in an argument recently.
It was along the lines of "If we're not using the f---- stuff the f----- JavaEE platform gives us if it's suitable thne we may as f---- well all learn assembler"
I'm probably the only one at work whose ever written assembler... And that was for a 6502.
Are there actually people who don't hand-cruft all their HTML :o
Yes... I tell everyone else I can write their SQL
It's worked so far...
Of course JavaEE is a ballache in itself because anyone that's not massively behind the curve was already doing Spring and saw no need to shift.
Also if anyone can tell me why ColdFusion servers like slicing HTTP messages in half and then rejecting the 2nd half of the JSON that it bothered to pass onto it's parser that would be great as "Stop using this ancient pish" got the response "aye you're writing the replacement now, but erm we need to get discharge documents sent now"
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That's what we get for not doing it all in machine code.
I'm probably the only one at work whose ever written assembler... And that was for a 6502.
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Would that be the BBC Micro or one of the other Acorn offerings? Trying to remember if that was RISC. Got a feeling it was, but it’s been 35 years or so.
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That's what we get for not doing it all in machine code.
I'm probably the only one at work whose ever written assembler... And that was for a 6502.
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Would that be the BBC Micro or one of the other Acorn offerings? Trying to remember if that was RISC. Got a feeling it was, but it’s been 35 years or so.
BBC Micro B and BBC Master depending on whether I got in the Tech Studies room first; linking the Memory Mapped IO ports up to a Pneumatic plunger for the purpose of shoving a Scalextrix car back on track.
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I'm trying to remember if I've ever written a program in machine code and run it on an actual processor, rather than as an exercise under exam conditions.
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I haven't.
In my decades in IT I never even wrote any assembler (or equivalents for other machines). I remember COBOL & FORTRAN, though AFAIK none of my code is still in use, not even the SQL. IIRC the last time I wrote any was some years before I was evicted from employment. ("Here's some money. Go away. You can keep the phone & the final salary pension. And yes, the big wodge will arrive after the 5th of April, so shut up about tax.")
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That's what we get for not doing it all in machine code.
I'm probably the only one at work whose ever written assembler... And that was for a 6502.
[
Would that be the BBC Micro or one of the other Acorn offerings? Trying to remember if that was RISC. Got a feeling it was, but it’s been 35 years or so.
BBC micro ( and Acorn Atom ) were not RISC; they were 6502 based, same as the Apple ][
I/O was memory-mapped.
The basis of my computer education!
And played the original Zork on the Apple ][ from a floppy disk!
Yes, assembler is still used today when programming real-time systems using low level microcontrollers.
That's the way we roll.
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Assembler I've used more often. Mostly for PICs.
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That's what we get for not doing it all in machine code.
I'm probably the only one at work whose ever written assembler... And that was for a 6502.
[
Would that be the BBC Micro or one of the other Acorn offerings? Trying to remember if that was RISC. Got a feeling it was, but it’s been 35 years or so.
The 6502 did have a small instruction set compared to say the z80 which is why it was chosen. Acorn went on to produce their own risc processor the acorn risc machine or ARM which then went on to power your phone.
The BBC micro had the unusual feature that you could embed assembly language in your basic programs so machine code programming (ie typing in hexadecimal) was never really a big thing, but on z80 like the RML380Z school computer (yes one for everyone) it was. 40+ years on and I still know hex C9 is return from subroutine.
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I spent several years writing assembler for a Honeywell mainframe. Probably the job I enjoyed most. Occasionally altering floatable code running as part of the operating system, that was "interesting". That was back when Honeywell supplied source code. Then they supplied object code and microfiche, and eventually it just became black box stuff like other manufacturers.
I never wrote much Cobol or Fortran, but I certainly became very familiar with the pseudo assembler that the compilers generated. Useful when the application programmers gave upon why their programs weren't doing what they expected. Happy days sitting there with the calculator in octal, a bunch of highlighters, and half a box of paper of memory dump.
30 years back I think. But I've not written anything for for maybe 20 years. Probably the last time was some kind of Basic, when the children were growing up.
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That's what we get for not doing it all in machine code.
I'm probably the only one at work whose ever written assembler... And that was for a 6502.
[
Would that be the BBC Micro or one of the other Acorn offerings? Trying to remember if that was RISC. Got a feeling it was, but it’s been 35 years or so.
The 6502 did have a small instruction set compared to say the z80 which is why it was chosen. Acorn went on to produce their own risc processor the acorn risc machine or ARM which then went on to power your phone.
The BBC micro had the unusual feature that you could embed assembly language in your basic programs so machine code programming (ie typing in hexadecimal) was never really a big thing, but on z80 like the RML380Z school computer (yes one for everyone) it was. 40+ years on and I still know hex C9 is return from subroutine.
Well before your mobile phones. BBC Archimedes is the one I was thinking of when it comes to RISC.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Acorn_Archimedes
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That's what we get for not doing it all in machine code.
I'm probably the only one at work whose ever written assembler... And that was for a 6502.
[
Would that be the BBC Micro or one of the other Acorn offerings? Trying to remember if that was RISC. Got a feeling it was, but it’s been 35 years or so.
BBC micro ( and Acorn Atom ) were not RISC; they were 6502 based, same as the Apple ][
I/O was memory-mapped.
The basis of my computer education!
And played the original Zork on the Apple ][ from a floppy disk!
Yes, assembler is still used today when programming real-time systems using low level microcontrollers.
That's the way we roll.
The 6502 was sort of risc compared to say the z80. It had far fewer registers and operations, with nearly all operations completing in one clock tick. I think it was the start of the divergence with the intel progression to more and more complex instruction set chips.
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That's what we get for not doing it all in machine code.
I'm probably the only one at work whose ever written assembler... And that was for a 6502.
[
Would that be the BBC Micro or one of the other Acorn offerings? Trying to remember if that was RISC. Got a feeling it was, but it’s been 35 years or so.
The 6502 did have a small instruction set compared to say the z80 which is why it was chosen. Acorn went on to produce their own risc processor the acorn risc machine or ARM which then went on to power your phone.
The BBC micro had the unusual feature that you could embed assembly language in your basic programs so machine code programming (ie typing in hexadecimal) was never really a big thing, but on z80 like the RML380Z school computer (yes one for everyone) it was. 40+ years on and I still know hex C9 is return from subroutine.
Well before your mobile phones. BBC Archimedes is the one I was thinking of when it comes to RISC.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Acorn_Archimedes
The chip in the Archimedes was the ARM which stood for Acorn risc machine. As the potential grew ARM was rebranded as ARM advanced risc machine. Not sure how much ARM holdings is worth now but it must be tens of billions.
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Assembler I've used more often. Mostly for PICs.
In a previous life my grate frend Mr Woolrich used to do SCIENCE in assembler for IBM mainframes, for BA's flight planning systems. Joak about running out of petril over the North Atlantic goes here ==>
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I'm not a WordPress expert, far from it, though I've helped out on a couple of sites that use it. However, it seems a very workable CMS for low-end sites. Some people of course use it successfully for somewhat larger ones. Drupal and Joomla, whilst I know less about them, are more suited than WordPress to medium and large sites. Drupal in particular is used for some very large (and very active) sites indeed. I've made more use of Percussion CMS (some time ago), Sitecore and now Kentico.
CMSs are, I think, underestimated in the comments above. If you're building a decent-size site, and want consistency and the ability to write pages without knowing HTML in detail, they are the answer. The big issue is that people forget that they are for content management (the clue's in the name folks), not content creating and forgetting. If you just use them to pile in more stuff in a random fashion, you'll get a randomly-arranged site.
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WordPress is evil because you have to manage a database, making backups essential.
My goto at the moment is GravCMS as there is no database involved. In can function in much the same way as WordPress so you can edit and configure the site in browser. And the delight of doing this means that backing up is copying a directory rather than dumping a database.
Or, you can actually commit the website to GitHub or GitLab and use something like Digital Ocean's app platform pointed directly to the repository to make the website available. It makes it very easy/simple to maintain and a backup is as simple as
git clone https://github.com/doddad/mywebsite as either a scheduled task or a cron job.
Oh and changing the footer, in my workflow, is editing a YAML file somewhere.
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I'm not sure how you'd build an effective CMS without a database. Content management is all about relationships between content, which require one really. But there are WordPress hosted systems where backups are presumably(?) managed for you.
I'm not advocating WordPress - as I said, I'm no expert on it anyway - but I'm not sure I understand those objections.
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I'm not sure how you'd build an effective CMS without a database. Content management is all about relationships between content, which require one really. But there are WordPress hosted systems where backups are presumably(?) managed for you.
I'm not advocating WordPress - as I said, I'm no expert on it anyway - but I'm not sure I understand those objections.
Shared/multi-tennant hosting has massive drawbacks with few good hosts out there. There's one I've had a good experience with.
A database is a collection of structured data on disk. A collection of files is not really that much different. The good databaseless CMS have tags, sections, related articles, archives and all the things you get with Wordpress. And GravCMS is so very much like wordpress sometimes I can't tell the difference.
The lack of database made it easy for me to build a deployment pipeline. Commit a change, auto-deploy to demo site. Customer can approve and push a button to deploy to the live site. Just one of the many ways not having to deal with a database affords flexibility. Not to mention, saying goodbye to backups.
Also a lot easier to move from one domain to another - with Wordpress you have to find your way around scripting updates to a slew of records.