A few weeks OK, in Britain, a court ruled that a woman, who’s job it was to carry out marriages at a registry office, was entitled to opt out of performing doing her job if the ceremony was a civil partnership (gay marriage) as a result of her religious views. I am not intending to debate the rights or wrongs of that decision, but it did get me to thinking about support requests relating to websites where you disgree with the message.
Image you write an ass-kicker of a theme or plugin and there is a fair amount of take up. Someone contacts you and politely asks for you help because they are having problems with your plugin on their site. When you visit the site you find out that the point of the site is the promotion of a religious or anti-religious agenda that you find distateful, perhaps even offensive, although the person is not enciting violence or anything illegal.
I choose religion purely because it seems to stir up the most passion in both sides.
The question is: do you help him or her to fix their site or do you decline, ignore them, or any other variation thereof?
I have provided help to people even though I didn’t like the message or the point of their site, and to date I haven’t found one that has promted me to consider doing anything else. Perhaps I am just too nice a guy. But I can understand why someone would not want to put their spare time to helping further an agenda that was not their own. How about you?
The inexorable drive toward improvement (dare I say perfection?) that characterises the WordPress project is not only a source of benefit, but also one of the main causes of difficulty and complaint. When WordPress 2.5 was released people complained about the new interface. At every release people complain that there are too many upgrades. Surely WordPress is good enough already?
It seems to me that WordPress is heading in a direction. I am not confident in the destination, intended or otherwise, but each new feature adds complexity and takes WordPress further from the ‘dead simple, gets things done’ WordPress that initially attracted me.
My first attraction to WordPress was a direct reaction against enterprise content management systems that are rediculously over specified and restrictive, and their open source cousin Joomla, so naturally I want to WordPress to keep its place as their oposite.
To an extent, that means reigning back the new features and considering how the system operates. What I would really like to see is the modularisation of the core. I would like WordPress to be a shell featuring user management, URL management, and a blank admin panel, into which each feature inserts itself in the same way as plugins add themselves.
This means that every feature (or combined features where absolutely necessary) sits in its own folder and can be deactivated, replaced or even deleted without any ramifications except the loss of that feature.
I think Backpress will help with this, but I don’t think it will ever happen. The attraction of adding new features is a strong one and far more interesting than altering parts of the code that most people never touch, or even see.
WordPress already meets my needs as a user. There is nothing more I need or want. Security patches aside is there really any need to add anything else?
I’ve disliked the design I produced for this site pretty much since the day I launced it. It wasn’t so many things that I wanted it to be, but it was functional and so it stayed. But no more.
I have done what, a few short months ago would have been unthinkable: I have used a third-party theme instead of building my own.
It is unlikely the theme will stay intact for long. In-fact the CSS has already been changed a little to help modify the navigation and will probably change more in the coming weeks. I also need to change the colours from blue to purple, as purple is the colour I used before.
Seeking Testers
The navigation on this site operates using the Fun with Sidebar Tabs plugin. So much of that plugin has changed recently so now it can do much much more. With that though comes responsibilities, so I am looking for a few people to test the new version.
But what does it do?
First of all I have added an option to calculate the number of tabs displayed according to height instead of width. This means opens up much more potential, something you will soon see on the home page of this site.
Secondly I have added an option which prevents the javascript redistributing some of the contents. This means that accordian tabs are now possible. I will also be including some of these on this site in due course.
Third: I have added a rotation feature that rotates through the tabs, and tab levels, displaying the contents of each one. There are 5 possible speeds.
Lasty, and most important by far, is the template option. The new version includes an option to load the CSS from a template. This means that you can offer your tab designs out to others to use. I will be producing some basic templates to begin with that people can use and modify.
I’m quite excited about this release, there is a little more work to go finishing some defaults, but it is nearly there.
If you are interested in testing out the latest version of the fun with sidebar tabs plugin then please drop a note in the comments (Wordpress 2.5+ is required).
Before attending WordCamp last weekend I was having second thoughts about my involvement in WordPress. Developing plugins isn’t an easy job and the problems always seem to arise when you planned to do something else. WordCamp changed my mind though to the extent that I am quite excited about the Fun with Sidebar Tabs updates that are coming soon.
I don’t want to go into the new features too much but I will say that they will make the plugin much more flexible, and at the same time much easier for the casual user who doesn’t have the knowledge of CSS to get the most out of it.
I do however have a question for any users of the plugin. I want URLs of the best implementations of tabs that you have found. If you want your tabs to look like something you have seen let me know.