Oh what a tangled web we reap,
When first we practice to be cheap!

I haven't updated my web page design freeware in an embarrassingly long time.
Generic web searches on the topic produce huge numbers of results, many of which

friendly folks who HAVE been keeping up on the topic (as I really SHOULD have
been) will offer some suggestions.

My needs are fairly basic.  I can work with HTML up to moderate levels of

do the simple stuff without having to resort to hand coding.


convenient to have something that works with frames for a couple of sites I have
to update occasionally.

The one thing that I REALLY want to avoid is automatic massive recoding of the
sort Microsoft is infamous for.  (I still vividly remember my first experience

working at home and needed to make a trivial adjustment to a column width or
some such while at work.  I made this adjustment in Office and saved, only to

changes, including rewriting all of the image references so that they no longer
functioned.)

BTW, I do already have and use Open Office as a very basic starting point.
Thanks in advance for all replies.

Best Regards,
Mike C.

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Ever tried Wordpress, the very clean and flexible open-source CMS behind many
blogs and websites?

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"nemesis" <nam### [at] gmailcom> wrote:
> Ever tried Wordpress, the very clean and flexible open-source CMS behind many
> blogs and websites?

Thanks for the suggestion.  I gave it a look and found out that if I wanted to
develop a blog, this is one mighty impressive piece of freeware. I also found
out that a great deal of the functionality that I was hoping to find is
available... *SOMEWHERE* amongst literally thousands of available plug-ins that
are kinda-sorta searchable.  Although I certainly have NOT forgotten that one
should be grateful for FREEware and not complain about limitations, I am hoping
to get a few rather mundane projects done fairly quickly without a lot of
searching and experimentation.

I may, however, have found the answer to my own question.  It seems that I may
have been ignoring the 800-pound Mozilla in the room.  The last time I took a

thought much about it since.  It seems that most, if not all, of my objections
have been answered in 2.2, which is now much better at dealing with CSS menus,
layers and the like.  Also, it seems that the features that I might want to add
can be had from just a few easy-to-locate add-ons. Hopefully, this info might
prove helpful to someone in a similar position.

Best Regards,
Mike C.

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On 25/07/2011 06:33 PM, nemesis wrote:
> Ever tried Wordpress, the very clean and flexible open-source CMS behind many
> blogs and websites?

Apparently this is a different Wordpress to the one that runs my blog, 
constantly mangles my markup, and has a pretty but defective stylesheet 
that makes bullet lists appear without bullets...

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"Mike the Elder" <nomail@nomail> wrote:
> "nemesis" <nam### [at] gmailcom> wrote:
> > Ever tried Wordpress, the very clean and flexible open-source CMS behind many
> > blogs and websites?
>
> Thanks for the suggestion.  I gave it a look and found out that if I wanted to
> develop a blog, this is one mighty impressive piece of freeware. I also found
> out that a great deal of the functionality that I was hoping to find is
> available... *SOMEWHERE* amongst literally thousands of available plug-ins that
> are kinda-sorta searchable.

That's because you're doing it wrong:  forget about manual html coding, focus on
content.  That's what Wordpress is about.  I suggest you start a dummy "blog"
there just to get the hang of it.  It is a blog if you make "posts", it is a
website if you make pages, both seamlessly supported with Wordpress.  You don't
code at all, unless you want to.  Wordpress' Dashboard for users is also an
incredible piece of web 3.0 wysiwyg editing, much akin to that of Composer.

All the work regarding extra plugins is up to the admin, not the one crafting a
website with such powerful and straightforward tool.  In any case, Wordpress
default install is already solid gold.

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Invisible <voi### [at] devnull> wrote:
> On 25/07/2011 06:33 PM, nemesis wrote:
> > Ever tried Wordpress, the very clean and flexible open-source CMS behind many
> > blogs and websites?
>
> Apparently this is a different Wordpress to the one that runs my blog,
> constantly mangles my markup, and has a pretty but defective stylesheet
> that makes bullet lists appear without bullets...

You do realize that bullets showing or not in a list is a design choice of the
theme, right?  In any case, yeah, must be the Wordpress used by Fortune 500
companies:

http://wordpress.org/showcase/tag/fortune-500/

Not the one used by single geeks who fight their tools.

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>> Apparently this is a different Wordpress to the one that runs my blog,
>> constantly mangles my markup, and has a pretty but defective stylesheet
>> that makes bullet lists appear without bullets...
>
> You do realize that bullets showing or not in a list is a design choice of the
> theme, right?

Yes. But unfortunately one I can't change. (If I had my way, there's 
quite a few things I'd tweak - like the horrid sans serif font...)

None of this has any bearing on the most infuriating problem, which is 
WYSIWYG page editor which utterly mutilates any markup present. 
Fortunately I eventually found out how to disable this buggy mess so I 
can write HTML (semi)manually. This allows me to produce output which is 
at least half-decent. When the WYSIWYG editor was enabled, just clicking 
the "edit" button would cause the page to load into the WYSIWYG editor, 
instantly destroying all my markup. I'd then switch to code mode and 
spend 20 minutes putting all the markup back in. Now I've managed to 
configure it so that the hateful thing never shows up.

Also, apparently none of the pages that WP generates are W3C-compliant. 
They're tagged as XHTML Transitional, which is quite forgiving, but 
validation fails with stupid errors like "you can't put <LI> inside 
<LI>". Dozens of them.

More minor niggles include the fact that "pages" have to be strictly 
hierachical, and apparently you can't have breadcrumbs. You can set WP 
to email you if certain things happen. By default it emails you about 
*everything*. I've now turned most of these off, but apparently it's 
impossible to turn off the emails about new users signing up. Thus every 
day I get a dozen emails about fre### [at] qualityru signing up on my 
blog. Stuff like that.

> In any case, yeah, must be the Wordpress used by Fortune 500 companies:
> Not the one used by single geeks who fight their tools.

Microsoft Windows is used by Fortune 500 companies. Are you seriously 
suggesting that Microsoft Windows is a good OS?

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