CoffeeBear.net

Michael vs. Root

Posted by Mark | Filed under Rants, WordPress

If you’ve been involved in the WP com­mu­nity at all for the past cou­ple of months; you couldn’t have missed that Root and Michael Heile­mann have been… bick­er­ing back and forth about Kubrick and designs and usabil­ity and what­not. From what I saw in the var­i­ous threads on the WP Sup­port forums, on both’s blogs and else­where they both need a good smack to the head. I’m too tired of the whole deal to really care who started it or who’s cur­rently at fault.

Why bring it up then? Michael’s got a thread up that’s con­tin­u­ing the spat. Nor­mally that wouldn’t be enough for me to bother putting a note up here but one of the peo­ple com­ment­ing on Michael’s thread said:

Quot­ing Root:

IMHO that is going to make WP less acces­si­ble to the self design end user than it is now. Some of us are quite inter­ested in these things.

That means they’ll have to pay a designer to do it for them, hope­fully. To that I say, “Bravo!” (There are way too many peo­ple run­ning around loose on the Inter­net with a boot­leg copy of Front Page call­ing them­selves web design­ers, IMHO.)

Another per­son com­ment­ing replied:

There are way too many peo­ple run­ning around loose on the Inter­net with a boot­leg copy of Front Page call­ing them­selves web design­ers, IMHO.

Hear hear

And that just pisses me off. I’m not a designer and make no claims to be one. I do have a very rudi­men­tary grasp of CSS and a slightly bet­ter one of HTML. I’ve bor­rowed a book from a friend of mine and am learn­ing a bit about PHP/MySQL. I do all my cod­ing either in Blue­fish¹ or Notepad². I looked at the tem­plate WP shipped with in v1.02 and real­ized it was beyond my skills to really mod­ify at the time. So I grabbed a cou­ple of styles from the Alex King style com­pe­ti­tion but I saw that under some cir­cum­stances they’d break. I wasn’t happy about that and I didn’t like that my blog’s style wasn’t some­thing I’d crafted. I kept look­ing around for some­thing bet­ter to use and then Root came out with his Tri­dent tem­plate. I was able to drop that in and make a few mod­i­fi­ca­tions so that I had a style that’s my own. It’s ugly as all get out but I could alter it as I need it with­out hav­ing to shell out more money to indulge in my blog­ging hobby. And the idea that just because I’m not a designer that I must be using a pirated copy of Front­page³ in order to work on my site is insult­ing! I also think that if WP v1.3 does make it sub­stan­tially more dif­fi­cult to cre­ate new themes for my site then I will have to an alter­na­tive platform.

¹ When work­ing on my desk­top and booted into Linux.
² When work­ing on my lap­top, whose CD-ROM drive sucks so bad I can’t get win­dows off the machine.
³ Front­page is a piece of crap! I’ve had to use it at work a few times and it writes the most hor­rific code! If you’re going to claim that peo­ple are pirat­ing web design soft­ware; why not credit them with pirat­ing some­thing that’s actu­ally use­ful.

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