CoffeeBear.net

WordPress Interfaces

Posted by Mark | Filed under WordPress

If you’re not a reg­u­lar WP user, then you might not have noticed there’s a large amount of anger and frus­tra­tion hap­pen­ing in their sup­port forums lately. Basi­cally, some peo­ple in the com­mu­nity have spent a great deal of time and effort help­ing out WP users with lay­out prob­lems that oth­ers ended up with due to quirks in the default lay­out and in some¹ of the designs that were posted over at Alex King’s Word­Press Style Com­pe­ti­tion. But that wasn’t the direct cause of the cur­rent mess in the forums; no the blame for that seems to rest with Michael’s announce­ment that a vari­a­tion of his Kubrick style would be included with the next release of Word­Press. This was the spark to an appar­ent holy war between WP’s com­mu­nity sup­port lead­ers² and WP’s devel­op­ers, with a bunch of fan­boys on the side­lines esca­lat­ing things.

Is either side guilt free in this sit­u­a­tion? Nope.

Can any­thing be done? Sure, Matthew Mul­len­weg could just say that noth­ing is final yet for the next WP release and any fur­ther debate on that sub­ject will not be tol­er­ated. Next, Root and Michael Heile­mann should have a no-holds barred match where they get to pum­mel each other.… or they could just start e-mailing another and go into a civil dis­cus­sion about what prob­lems each has with the other’s design/template/interface³. Matt could also explain exactly what fun­da­men­tally flaws and use­abil­ity issues exist in Root’s interfaces.

Oh and for the record, I’m on my own side in this bat­tle. I like the look of Kubrick but it doesn’t fit my needs so I’ve based my site on Root’s Tri­dent inter­face. Unfor­tu­nately, part of the fall­out of the cur­rent holy war is that Root has removed the down­loads of his inter­faces. Since I think those inter­faces pro­vide an extremely valu­able resource for the WP com­mu­nity; I’m post­ing links for peo­ple to down­load them here.
Gem­ini — 2 col­umn inter­face
Tri­dent — 3 col­umn inter­face
Vesu­vius — 3 col­umn flex­i­ble width interface

As a small side note, Root was work­ing on a 3 col­umn flex­i­ble width inter­face called Vesu­vius, but it’s also been taken down and I don’t have a copy of it. I’d be happy to post it here; if some­body can help me get a copy of it.

Also for the truly sick, here’s some links to the ongo­ing debate over in the WP sup­port forums:

• Gem­ini and Tri­dent templates
• Charleen Style
• Why using Kubrick on 1.3 is a mis­take — This is cur­rently the main holy war thread.

¹ Pos­si­bly most or all, but I’m not qual­i­fied to make that call.
² I could put names here, but if you don’t know who I’m talk­ing about already; then it’s exceed­ingly unlikely that you’d care.
³ Harsh words have been posted by both sides about things they don’t like in the other’s design/template/interface but no real con­ver­sa­tion has taken place. Ok, so I’m cheat­ing and post­ing some names any­way. Tough luck, this is my blog and I write what I want. :P

UPDATE 02:45 PM (GMT –06:00): Thanks to Hanni (who posted it in the WP Sup­port forums), I am now mir­ror­ing a copy of Vesuvius.

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