wordpress™ wank

WP.org search is broken. Again. Matt blames Yahoo!.

Am I missing something here? If, as seems to be the case, there is no-one on wp-hackers up to coding an adequate and robust search function, can’t they just stick a Google search box in there? I know it’s fashionable to hate on Google these days, and of course they haven’t bunged WP any cash (yet) but it would at least, you know, work.

(But even though this just happens to coincide with the monthly security hole, I’m not going to trot out my ’security not found’ screenshot again. That would be mean.)

On Shuttle, again, I’m afraid I have to join in with seriocomic:

after a year and a bit, all you have is photoshop mockups? No code yet?

Nope. It takes five or six blokes eighteen months to come up with some pictures. I have no problem with that; I’m sure they’ve all had more important things to do and a hell of a job agreeing on anything at all. (Somebody mentioned in Khaled’s comments that he’s a bit over-effusive when talking about his colleagues — always a sure sign of backstage bitchery).

What’s strange is that Matt’s expected to code it all up on his own by Christmas (or whenever 2.5’s slated for release). This seems sort of lopsided to me, especially since CSS and XHTML aren’t his specialist area and he’s got several other sites to run. It’s not like people haven’t offered to help, but, well, everyone should have twigged by now that he doesn’t do delegation. And now Kubrick Guy is fanning the flames by posting his own copies of the mockups that were in place before Khaled did a Matt and decided to tackle everything himself, so that his groupies can coo over them and say how much better they are than the official non-Kubrick-Guy ones. Sigh.

Whatever the internal politics, if the code was too complex for the people on the project to write themselves we can’t reasonably expect it to be implemented any time soon (though we may get a couple of nice rounded buttons). Thank goodness for Tiger.

[looks at 'best 3-col']

[is confused]

[resizes window]

[realises all you needed to do to win that category was rip the Holy Grail layout from ALA, as suggested by Lorelle, and apply basic styling. curses self for not having bothered to finish own Holy Grail layout. closes tab.]

I completely want ‘Holiday’ to win the latest theme contest. It really showcases what can be done with options. Plus, there isn’t nearly enough animated clipart on most wordpress themes for my liking.

Do you think if enough of us file requests we’ll get it on wordpress.com? I promise I would use it. Having an entire new layout for every US public holiday would be great.

Shuttle is done, finally, in spite (or possibly because) of Kubrick Guy announcing on his podcast a couple of weeks back that he was quitting the project. It looks nice, though still a little dark for my taste, and it’s not as pretty as Tiger (but then, it has to work in a range of environments, which Tiger doesn’t). Nonetheless, it looks significantly better than the current default and light years better than the amateurish grey Georgia that came before.

Of course, how nice it will look once Matt pushes the font size up a few notches and slaps humongous logos all over the place remains to be seen.

Oh my god it’s widgets gone mad! (via WTC) And let run wild under an attribution-non-commercial CC licence, at that.

Somebody give me an argument for this being legal, please? I’ve got a basketful of reasons why it isn’t and I’m in the mood for another abstruse GPL debate.

You know, once you realise (as I just did, in a comment on my last post) that this easytags idea is actually just about giving wordpress.com users the ability to edit themes without the ability to execute PHP directly — the proposed tags will only be used in the online editor, and are therefore pointless for anyone with FTP access — the knicker-twisting on wp-hackers gets exponentially more amusing.

None of the people involved in that discussion have even mentioned wordpress.com. I find that split interesting. It’s like every coder not on the Automattic payroll has forgotten it exists. This is probably because they can’t chuck any code in here so it is basically worthless to them.

Did you miss me? I was busy rushing to complete another crappy theme to add to the four million already out there. Since then I have been engaging in a little light persecution of Six Apart; but that’s no fun, it really does feel like kicking puppies. They don’t bite back, they just look at you with their big apologetic eyes, and you feel bad that you called them on their screw-ups because they’re so quick to own up and they’re so very sorry and they try so very hard.

They’re doing a 1.2-style Zen Garden ripoff thing where everyone just has to build stylesheets for a basic template. Which is a great idea, but your template has to be pretty robust, and it never is. I don’t know which is better: listening attentively to everyone’s suggestions and producing forty million revisions of the xhtml in a bid to keep everyone happy; or dismissing their concerns, insisting the template is perfect as it is and then junking it because it doesn’t have cool rounded corners.

And then I drop in on the testosterone-laden swamp that is wp-hackers and it makes, if that is possible, even less sense than usual, because somebody said the bad word, a word so inflammatory the forums liked to pretend it didn’t exist:

and then somebody else threatens to FORK!!! and the list is divided between those saying ‘NO! Forking is eeeevil!’ and those saying ‘um, no, freedom to fork is a FUNDAMENTAL part of open source philosophy’ and the others saying ‘please do because we don’t want you and your dissenting views round here anyway’.

And then I went to catch up on the saga of the theme repository guy who got accused of being an evil scam-merchant because he dared to put Google Ads on his site. However, if you accuse people of accusing him of being an evil scam-merchant they go nuts at you, so I’m going to let that go with a long sigh and no further comment. Read the rest of this entry »