So I was looking for a wp plugin which would feature my social blog updates (from melative or kronblr) and ran into mnw. Needless to say, this is awesome, but scary.
It’s tough to walk into this kind of extension when the inner-workings are likely hefty… I do think this static page implementation is interesting.
usagijen has an awesome post up about WordCamp Philippines 2009. There was a point that struck me about WP as a CMS.
I was talking to mellow bunny in the #melative freenode channel the other day about this, and I have to disagree with Wordpress as the Ultimate CMS, mainly because it is not “meta-coded” enough, or rather because it is a finite solution at the core; a system for blogging (entries, pages, comments).
If we take a step up and look at the concept of a CMS, it doesn’t really solve the blogging problem until it is instantiated/implemented, but because a CMS is a more general solution it is capable of becoming something Wordpress cannot, take Joomla’s LMS for instance1. From another perspective, if we look at the activity at Drupal, we see that there are blogging modules, but also a whole lot of other stuff.
In short, a fully fledged CMS is more like a framework than a specific solution; WP is downstream (more specified) in development stages. The added compromise of using Wordpress as a CMS for something other than the blogging problem would be that of using a db schema not built for whatever specific problem that needs to be solved (the ability to optimize without modifying the wp tables and without creating an entirely new subsystem is limited imo).
A good example I have interaction with, Melative. There’s no way WP could handle the inter-contextual linking of the backend (talking about the “encyclopedia pages” only). Okay, so that’s not entirely true, because WP could be used to get similar output, and possibly even the linking through plugins… but, by the time all this customization was done, it would have over-specified the solution. The fact that WP is handling page-data becomes pointless, because the page data is not static dynamic and also needs semantic linking to another general system. Not to mention that it would be a thicker codebase.2
So anyhow… just thought I’d share that opinion. Wordpress is awesome nonetheless, it is a role model in “method” for another project I’m on ^^ If considering it a CMS, I’d say it is more of a Static-CMS… maybe most CMS are used that way, who knows, but in my mind CMSs allow more auto/dynamic content and are capable of being adapted into a wider array of solutions, one being a blog3.
A very non-sense post, but here’s the recent theme/css mod:
So basically, it’s the exact same, but I changed the structure so it fills the WS. Changes:
Anyway, the trick to all this wasn’t fun, because modifying present themes [that weren't built that way] is a no-no. Blah, *needs a drink*…. so, how did I do the flexible sidebar, with persistant columns? I won’t go into the specific adjustment, but here’s the general idea:
A professional CSS wizard would probably know what this is called, I call it using up the whitespace of a single column, which emulates a larer number of columns.
My main reasoning for this is that the feed columns get rather tall, but when side-by-side they average out the page height. Though, not every screen likes a really wide page, so it is dependant on the browser window. And ya.
Melative Current Anime