Ikiru Design

Over the weekend, I decided to finally install a copy of the WordPress trunk — that’s the currently-being-worked-on version for those not familiar with the term. For need of something to write on that new installation, I noted my first impressions of it. It seems relevant to share as the WordPress team is now soliciting advice about its menu structures.

It worth noting that I did this Saturday. Things have changed since. If you’re interested, popularly relevant information about development is at the WordPress Blog. More abbreviated notes, and up-to-the-day changes are tracked here.

Because some of my impressions make little sense without visuals, I’ve included a gallery of the most notable changes that have so far been made in the progress toward 2.7. (Sidenote: first time I’ve used the gallery in WordPress.)

And now my impressions, as originally noted:

I don’t really like how the new version smashes out the horizontal space. Though I doubt the change is nearly as big as it currently seems to me, it’s undeniable that the compose area fits fewer words per line than did previous (2.6-) versions.

The left side navigation has its pluses and minuses. I like that you can get to any page at all from it, but it’s also there even when you aren’t wanting to go to any page.

I think the term Utilities in the sidebar is misguided. “Manage” seemed to make more sense, and still does.

The built-in browse and install feature for plugins is pretty unquestionably cool.

The built-in upgrade to WordPress itself seemed to have failed on my one and only attempt. (It has since worked for me, the failure may have been a fluke.)

I think the ability to drag anything on the write page the sidebar is good, but it’s not as much customizability as I’d like. Will I ever be able to put a custom field on a post, without having to name that field every time? And be able to put that field right under the title field if I so choose? Until then any changes or not to the Write page will seem rather superficial to me.

There appears to have been few or no changes made to the Themes area thus far.

The dashboard has changed, but right now the utility of the “Inbox” and Quick Post sections, both sitting above the news boxes of 2.5+, are open questions.

Clearly there’s no small amount of work left before 2.7 “ships” in November (by current plans). That said, I’m amazed by all the great features slated for inclusion, and I feel so lucky to blog on such a constantly-improving platform.

The epic showdown. Two titans of free internet content-management will meet in this arena. Only one can emerge victorious.

Two things should be made clear at the outset: (1) I was looking to make a link blog, not a typical tumblelog with multiple kinds of posts, all formatted differently; and (2) I eventually chose (self-hosted) WordPress. Yes, I just killed the drama. But this is about a comparison, and not (as I implied in the last paragraph) about winners or losers.

There were, three battles in this war. The first is the one that only matters to the proprietor: the back-end. This focuses primarily on how easy it is to create and edit entries for such a blog. Second, and what was the deciding factor for me, was archiving. That is: how easy it is to find what you want among the old stuff. The final issue is rather nebulous, but we’ll call it flexibility. That being whether each CMS can do the splits.

The Back

This is, without question, the place where WordPress loses a lot of points. And where Tumblr shines, especially if you’re looking for more than a link blog.

Tumblr’s backend is stylish, as the image at right demonstrates. I could go all the way to elegant and perhaps beautiful. Essentially you select the kind of post you’re going to be making, and then you’re taken to a specific page that’s tailored for making that kind of post. If you haven’t played around with Tumblr, it might be worth signing up just to see this.

WordPress, on the other hand, is a hulking CMS which can do lots of things. But it’s not terribly elegant at any of them. The way I create a post for my link blog demonstrates well. On the top the title, post text, and tags are entered. Then the link is added down at the bottom in the “custom fields” area. In which I’ve had to create a custom field called “link,” in which I put URL I want this entry to point to.

The use of custom fields — by definition separate from WordPress’s normal working — also makes it slightly hard to style entries properly, and harder still to make the feed act correctly (a problem I still haven’t fixed on my blog). I don’t need to go into detail, but suffice it say that it’s a headache.

Advantage Tumbler

The Archives

This is where WordPress, comparatively, shines. And the reason that I decided to throw my lot in with the ugly backend of WordPress, rather than the snazzy ease of Tumblr.

Tumblrs archive (see random example) look nearly as fresh and innovative as Tumblr’s backend. When I first saw one I said: “Wow. This is cool!”

And even though all those statements are true, Tumblr’s Archives are troublesome. For one, I’m not a fan of horizontal scrolling, which any reasonably old blog would have. And the only way to search such archives is with a browser’s built-in search fuction — which works, but is hardly elegant. And the ability to navigate with tags, of which I’m becoming an ever bigger fan, is completely out as well.

By contrast, WordPress is built for archives. The archives page I’ve thrown together for my nascent link blog gives you some ideas. There are tags there, as well as categories and monthly archives. Sure there’s a lot less flash than Tumblr’s page, but this has something else that Tumblr doesn’t. The ability to search. Built-in. And search plus all the ways you can view a WordPress archive means a lot to me.

Advantage WordPress

Flexibility

As I mentioned at the start, this a rather nebulous category. It encompasses most everything that I haven’t mentioned but feel the need to.

Both Tumblr and WordPress have a large array of themes. For the purposes of tumbling or linkblogging, Tumblr’s better in this. As for the novice, some seemingly-complex things have to be done to any WordPress theme to make it work at all.

Both tumblr and WordPress can exist at their own domains (though the tumblr default is X.tumblr.com, it can be easily changed). Having said that, all Tumblr backend work happens at tumblr.com.

Also, if one is reasonably skilled, it should noted that WordPress can do much more than Tumblr. But many, not even myself, are reasonably skilled.

So for the novice Tumblr is probably a wise choice (note that I’m not wise), you can’t do many of the things that WordPress allows you — seperate pages, for example — but the ease-of-use is hard to beat.

This is hard to call, so I’ll go ahead and do it the easy way:

Novice: Advantage Tumblr

Level 3 Nerd: Advantage WordPress

Conclusions

This contest is hard to call. Each CMS got 1.5 points out of three. As I suggested, I would decide this based on nerdiness. If you’re comfortable with CSS, HTML, PHP, and WordPress, I think that’s the obvious choice. If the acronyms in the last sentence confused and disoriented you, Tumblr’s probably a wiser bet.

Forced to choose an overall winner, I think I’d choose Tumblr.

The only reason I’m not currently using it is that dislike it’s archiving system. And that I like the possibility for future improvement when I finally get smart and motivated enough.

I hope I clinched the choice for you, affirmed what you were alreay thinking. Neither system’s terrible. Neither systems perfect. It’s just important to choose the best one for your needs and abilities.

I was working on another post (here’s the first) about improving your WordPress Archives pages when I realized that some may not even know how to show the one they already have. If that’s your situation, fear not: it’s very easy, and I’ve got pictures.

Essentially, to get the archives(.php) page included in the theme you’re using to display, you have to create a page with the Archives template applied to it. If that’s sufficient for you to do it, feel free to stop reading. If you’re still a little confused, read on.

Since I also don’t have an archives page (as of this writing), you can follow along as I create one.

First, from the dashboard, click on “Write.”

Then, click “Write Page.”

Title the page, I chose the bland but useful “Archives.” In almost all cases this will only by used to determine the the text that links to the page. It’s rare (but not impossible) for the archives page to reflect the title you gave it.

Locate and enlarge the “Page Template” box in the right sidebar.

Change the page template, to “Archives” it should be there for most themes. If it’s not you’ll either need to put a new archives.php into the theme’s folder, or use a new theme. But we’ll move on like you’ve found it.

Press “Publish,” and bask in the glow of work well done. See my result here.

If there’s one big problem with WordPress (and blogs in general) it’s that posts come and go very quickly. This is great for people who are embarrassed by what they’re writing, but for the average person this can be a great disappointment.

It also doesn’t help the case that WordPress’s default Archives page is ugly and hard to use. Nor that most free themes that contain an Archives page aren’t much better.

Since you may be a little confused, dear reader, some visuals. The default WordPress archives page (that’s archives.php for those keeping score at home) is pictured at right (click for bigger).

Anyone who’s ever used it will know that they’re taken from the monthly link to pages that simply show all entries from that month in full form (this time we’re talking about archive.php sportsfans). The format and contents of those pages doesn’t concern us now, as it’s a long-standing — even if unwise — tradition that clicking “February 2007” on the blog of anyone mildly prolific is a dangerous idea.

If you look very hard at improving the Archives page in WordPress, you’ll quickly come to understand why they tend to be so sub-par. WordPress’s native function to create archives (wp_get_archives) is frighteningly limited in it’s abilities. I’ll spare you the details, but suffice it to say that nothing it outputs is much better than what we’ve seen.

Since WordPress itself fails, a different application is needed. Having already found Justin Blanton’s Smart Archives plugin — which I used to make my archives at Frozen Toothpaste more presentable — I decided that was a good place to start.

As the Frozen Toothpaste archive shows (see left), the Smart Archive plugin allows you to cleanly display all the your writings from a given month listed chronologically. This, I decided, was the Archives page I wanted my themes to have.

But requiring plugins for a theme to work is fraught with problems. It requires more work than the average WordPress user can or wants to commit to. So however I made my archive, it had to be inside the theme. The easiest way to do that: include the plugin on the page that creates the archives — archives.php.

Though I’m neither a PHP or server-load “pro,” I couldn’t find much of a downside to to putting the code from the plug-in on the page (if you are such a person and can tell me that there is a problem, please do). And, better still, doing so would make the creation of a nice monthly archive as easy as the creation of a default poor one.

So essentially, that’s what I did. I did do a great deal of shrinking and modifying of Mr. Blanton’s plugin, but it meat of it is still intact. Most of my cuts were becuase I required it to do far less than the plugin can. I wanted the code as lean as it could be while still providing the necessary function, which I think it does. To see my archives.php page it in action, just head over to the Ikiru Demo Blog and look at it on any of my themes. (You can also see the Archives page on WordPress’s default theme for comparison.)

And if you’re looking for something even more fancy than the Archives pages provided by Smart Archives (in or outside of) my themes, I’d suggest that the best place to look is Clean Archives which is both flashier and larger than the Smart Archives plug-in. Though these characteristic were detrimental to my need here, they may be exactly what you’re looking for.

We’re now presenting this site on the BWO WordPress theme, designed by us (well, really me, I’ll drop the corporate we). This is certainly not the final version of the theme, but it’s a demonstrative one.

The beautiful picture at left was one of (not the first) that I found when searching Google for “black white orange” which, as you may have guessed, is what the BWO is in this theme’s name stands for.

BWO is a very simple theme. It contains no images, displays only one font (Georgia, for better or worse), and uses only three colors “black,” “white,” and “orange.” That is to say that there no HEX values in the stylesheet (you can check if you like). These parameters were meant as both a challenge and as a good set of training wheels for the bike of WordPress theming (admittedly, a bad metaphor).

Because this is my first theme, and I’m sure it’s still missing a number of things, I’ve not declared it complete. But it’s a nice place to start.