Very good news for Drupal and WordPress!!!

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On or around March 25, 2005 12:36 PM Chris Messina wrote this: #

I work for CivicSpace and helped create Spread Firefox. The choice to use CivicSpace for SFX was an important one and the right one because the tool fit the need.

In my discussions with Matt, we are working to come up with ways for open-source CMS’ like Drupal and WordPress to coexist and better comingle. It would be excellent, for example, if it were easier to port themes back and forth between the two so that you could run your own personal WordPress blog (as I do) but run your community with CivicSpace or Drupal and have the external (and internal) appearance be consistent for both admins and external visitors.

So Matt and I have been talking about how we can bring our user interfaces closer together so that the experience of moving between either tool is less jarring and more consistent. One real-world thing that’s happening as a result of our collaboration is that Drupal will be moving back to a separate admin UI, to be more consistent with WordPress. This will ultimately, or hopefully, lead to a more seamless upgrade path between WordPress and Drupal — so that you can start out with a personal blog and then scale up to a community when necessary, without having to unlearn or relearn a whole new UI. This improves the whole ecosystem of personal and community publishing.

Though the details are still hazy and is mostly talk at the moment, we are making progress. And since it’s my job to create a very positive user experience in Drupal (and by extension, CivicSpace), working with Matt completely makes sense. With the WP Foundation getting started up, I think that bringing our collective effort together will lead to a lot of really great things for the open source and blogging communities.

No follow, no interconnection

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There is a lot of enthousiasm on the web about Googles steps to block comment spamming, by using the rel=”nofollow” attribute of links. That is, when you want to completely block any links originating from your website. And if spammers would stop posting their spam.

Sargasso is an informative site with a lot of commenters who nog only babble away, but also post valuable links and addons to our articles. Removing any links from the comments is a blow for the interconnected web. But there is another option, one that would be much more fun and that would leave the open structure intact. But it would require some manual labour from the search industry.

I think it would be much more efficient if spamsites were removed from the index directly. Set up a few hidden weblogs on several systems, watch what spam appears on those sites and remove the sites they link to completely.

You’d probably have to change sites every few weeks, but after a while, spammers will notice that plugging around their urls on weblogs will only result in removal. And therefor would become counterproductive.

Links in this article:

Google Blog: Preventing comment spam
Ben Hammersly: Let no fellow nofollow, lest we all lie fallow
Simon Collison: Spammers get spannered by Google

+Eric Meyer: More Spam to Follow

Murphy’s graphic design laws

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If three designs are shown to a client, your least favorite will be chosen.
If two designs are shown, a third will be requested. If provided, then one of the first two will be chosen.

Hey… I know this sound… it is the sound of webdevelopment reality. The trick though, is not to consider it a problem but as a challenge of skills. I know that it can bequite frustrating, but in the end you go home, and your customer has a site that could have been much better.

There are some true remarks here: Murphy’s graphic design laws

Listit baby

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Did you say list? This will help: Listamatic: one list, many options

Incredible collection of lists, all with clear code and easy to implement. Also has links to lists. A real list of links to list resources. I like this linklist a lot 🙂

Quote of the Day

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…But before they got to hear Bush, they were expelled from the rally by Bush rally staff who objected to the words printed on the T-shirts they were wearing.

No, the words on the T-shirts the ladies were wearing did not disparage Bush, nor did they suggest support for Kerry or any other candidate. The words did not condemn or support the war in Iraq, nor did they slam any Administration policy. No, the T-shirts the three women wore showed an American flag, and under it the words, “Protect Our Civil Liberties”. That was all — I kid you not.

That was it. That was the last straw for me. That was the defining moment I’ll never forget. That was my epiphany.

Carl F. Worden is a lifelong (christian and conservative) republican who has decided to vote against Bush because he finds his former party ruled by fascists: The Last Straw

The best thing about webstandards

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The best thing about web standards is never having to say you’re sorry. (Joe)

Well, actually there are a lot of good things about webstandards, but besides that your documents are semantically correct, more accessible, faster to load and platform independent, we now have a way of creating webpages that is ‘the-right-way-to-do-it’ and that puts the burden of not being rendered correctly where it belongs: at the Browser vendor!

So yeah, you do not have to say sorry anymore. If somebody wants to visit valid pages with a poor browser, it’s their problem.

I don’t mean to say that proper rendering shouldn’t interest you though… just that when you have to choose between a hack or using standards… well, you figure it out 🙂

The poor usability of Open Source CMS

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Jeffrey Veen says what I have been experiencing for years now: Open Source CMS systems are built by geeks for geeks, and in a lot of cases very hard to use, even for the more experienced developer.

With every new system you’re forced to learn yet another local vocabulary, another admin flavour, install methodology that mostly are not as easy as promised. You are forced to use sometimes lousy built page templates, because learning the templating might take weeks… you never know. The promise is always there, but reality is that most systems don’t do what you want and are hard to customize.

A very nice and constructive rant from Jeffrey

Open source Content Management Systems – An Argumentative approach – What can you do with OSCMS? Explanations and eveluations of 7 Open Source CMS systems.

Michael Angeles replies to Veen’s article: Do open source content management systems suck?

Some time ago though, I decided to concentrate on three systems: WordPress for blogs, Mambo for small to mediumsized sites and Drupal for sites with complex informations requirements and growing potential. I’ll write some more on these systems in the future.

Ah, yet another good reply: Content, Content, who’s got the content? by Theodicius. Criticises Mambo in a friendly and constructive way.

How we really see the web

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We don’t read everything on the web. We scan, but we don’t scan everything. We zap from left to right in a ridiculous pace, searching for something that grabs our attention. We don’t really look at photo’s in news articles, unless they are big enough. The same for ads goes as well, size matters and we look longer, a lot longer, if it’s a text ad close to the main content of the page.

We have a way with bold intro paragraphs: we actually read them! Paragraphs’ best size is around 45-50 words, much longer will result in less attention. We also don’t read all the headlines and intros but spread our attention what results in a heatmaps of attention.

Eyetrack2004 is a loosely held investigation of what people watch when they visit newssites. Some of thse issues already surfaced in usability studies, but there are some pretty interesting findings in their public report. Which is also available as a 340 page downloadable pdf. One thing is clear: there definately needs to be more study by independent institutions of the way the user interacts with a website.

What we’ll find may very wel not please designers, and the final result may not be as pretty as it could be, but we’ll be sure that it will work.