Horrific CMS Interfaces, Part 1

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Usability and design guru Jeff Veen is looking for a better open source content management system, after demoing the selection available at OpenSourceCMS.com: “What I experienced was obtuse and complex software that was packed with gratuitous features at the expense of usability and user experience.”

I share his frustration, having gone through Mambo, phpWS, Xoops, Geeklog, Siteframe, PHP Nuke, and PHPWCMS in my search for a decent CMS for AteneoDC. I can tell you firsthand: dealing with open source content management is bad for stress levels and blood pressure. Never more in my life than in the past two months, building AteneoDC.com, have I so often yelled “WHAT WHERE THESE PEOPLE THINKING?!?!?” at the screen, at the horrible navigational structures I was subjected to, at being made to leap through any number of hoops just to make categories and articles and populate a sidebar menu. None of the above-mentioned apps are capable of producing fully valid, standards-compliant output, and none of them can manage a page made out of simple, structural markup right out of the box. Nested tables, unquoted attributes, and ALLCAPS tags are embedded right into the code, and no amount of PHP-savvy custom templating can get rid of them. (Though there are hundreds of custom templates out there, each more bloated, gradiated, and graphics-heavy than the last.) And the URL structures, oh the mess of ampersands and strange query string variables!

I finally settled on Mambo as the least of all evils and the most extensible of the CMS’s out there, but it’s still mostly a pain to use. There’s the strange dichotomy between “components” (main content extensions) and “modules” (sidebar extensions). When writing articles (for which one must first make “Sections” and “Categories”) needs one to enter a “name” and a “title,” and the interface leaves it unstated as to which is used for what part of the site. But wait, there’s more.

Probably the two most annoying parts of the Mambo admin interface involve the top of the screen, where they’ve put (1) a huge javascript hover dropdown menu, and (2) the form submit buttons. Having the form submit buttons up there means that you have to fill out a form to the bottom, then scroll back up to hit Save. And if you’re not extra-careful with your mouse, a dropdown menu directly above it will, well, drop down, obscuring the Save button while you click madly about, trying to get rid of the menu. It’s even worse when you use tabbed browsing. Anything will bring up those menus. Anything. And they don’t work properly in Safari on OS X 10.2.

The forms also break the Enter key. You have to go up and click on Save, otherwise nothing happens. And Mambo can’t parse line breaks unless you use the WYSIWYG editor, which only works in IE on Windows. The “weblinks” component is not customizable. You have to hack /languages/english.php to edit the intro text and graphic.

And this was from Mambo, the best of the bunch.

I’m sorry. I just can’t go on. This happens everytime I try to do something with an open source CMS: I approach the fringes of a nervous breakdown. Dealing with misanthropic user interfaces is just too horrible.

<Sobbing>

Learning History

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So if I’m getting my American History straight, George Washington cut down a cherry tree and threw it across the Mississippi River to help Lewis and Clark find their way to Gettysburg, so they could rescue Pocahontas from the Alamo and help Lincoln defeat the British in the Civil War, right?

MSH Vents a Bit

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Mount St Helens gave a mild belch today, spewing a mile-high cloud of ash and steam, and working up all the news outlets into a tizzy of alarmed “BREAKING NEWS ON THIS CATASTROPHIC ERUPTION” coverage. Reporters and volcano alike seem to have calmed down by now.

On the weblog front, Forester is just 40 miles from the mountain, and is writing about the volcanic events as they happen.

Check out this excellent USGS slide set of Mount St Helens through the course of its volcanic history since 1980, including some nice before-after shots, close-up photos of the lava dome inside the crater, and some of the scientific work that goes on around the volcano.

Post-Debate

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I don’t have much else to say on the debate that everybody else isn’t already saying. Overall, Kerry performed well, except for that “global test” bit. More from Barlow, Instant Replay, Lileks, Staunch Moderate, Talking Points Memo, and some very keen links on debate regulations from Wyclif.

Probably the funniest quick presidential debate roundup I’ve seen is from Wonkette. The phrase “Bush succumbed to vapor lock” gives me the titters everytime I read it.

Full debate transcript. More feedback links from DCist.

Bearing Fruit

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I have a few questions about homosexuality in church.

  • Can gay individuals become members of a Christian church?
  • Can a gay member occupy a position of authority in the church (e.g. deacon, elder, teacher) if he demonstrates the skill and ability to serve?
  • Can a single gay man become an ordained minister at your church? A married gay man?
  • Can a married gay couple become members at church?
  • Can a gay member who joins in civil marriage with a gay man continue to attend at church?
  • Should the church officiate same-sex marriages?
  • When we say that Jesus dined with sinners and tax collectors, and we then say that Jesus would do the same with homosexuals today, are we saying that they are sinners, the “sick” for whom the physician comes?
  • If a gay man is baptized, confessing with his mouth that Jesus Christ is Lord and believing in his heart that Christ rose from the dead, but continues to be gay, is he saved?
  • Did you know I used to have rainbow suspenders? No joke. I had rainbow suspenders when I was a kid. I wore them, too. With white pants.

More to ruminate upon.

EKG: Flatlining the Kingdom

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When all the Purpose-Driven books and keychains have been sold, and everyone has had their forty days, what comes next? “EKG, The Heartbeat of God,” of course! Key quote: “We cannot be satisfied with incremental growth. The Kingdom of God is about exponential growth.”

Churches jump from one Big Evangelistic Revival Program to the next, turning the Great Commission into a numbers-driven assembly line.

“Other seed fell on rocky ground, where it did not have much soil.”

SS1 Launch

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Spaceship One is in the air right now, riding on its carrier plane, White Knight, for its second suborbital flight, the first flight of its X-Prize attempt. Best of luck to them on this historic launch.

More links: SpaceflightNow SS1 Status Center here, for live text updates, and NASA TV has a live webcast. Discussion on Slashdot.

Update, 11:30am: Launched, lofted, and landed. There was a scary stability problem at the start: the craft entered a wicked roll for several seconds after its rocket fired. The rest of the flight seems to have gone smoothly, but that roll is an issue they’ll have to address before the next prize attempt on Monday.

Some tiny low-res screenshots from SS1’s own onboard videocam during the flight:

Tobacco on Trial on WordPress

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We have a new weblog project up at work: Tobacco on Trial, tracking the progress of the government lawsuit against the tobacco industry.

The blog runs on WordPress, with a variation of Binarybonsai’s Kubrick for layout. I had a bit of a struggle modifying Kubrick’s stylesheet: simplifying the design, removing the need for extra background images, trimming redundant CSS declarations — Michael Heilemann’s method of CSS organization is different from mine. (Not that my stylesheets are any paragon of virtue.) The final design needs only one graphic for the title (which I bring into <#header h1> with FIR), and uses a couple of colored boxes and white background for everything else. When I have time I’ll put the template up somewhere.

This was my first serious WordPress project. It’s an excellent CMS, easy to install and run, with lots of practical, useful features where they’re needed — easily hide-able where they’re not. The admin interface is a refreshing break from the crufty, kludgy wasteland of open-source CMS interfaces. (Much more on that some other time.) “Official” support is fairly patchy compared to MovableType, as this is open-source, after all, but the forum is friendly and responsive, and the wiki is a perfect tool to gradually accrete collaborative knowledge in the absence of a paid support staff.

Probably my only complaint about WordPress is templating: you need to know PHP (or have a keen eye for find-replace) to do any mucking about with template code. Having everything in a single file means lots of large, nested if-else structures, which gets confusing. Additionally, certain template “tags” (actually just various functions called inside <? PHP tags ?>) are not particularly customizable (the_excerpt(), I’m looking at you). Gladly, WP coders know what they’re doing, and have been quite intelligent about indentation and commenting, both in the index.php template and in the WP code itself.

(I was also going to complain about WordPress making the common open-source CMS mistake of cluttering the home directory with all its files and dependencies, rather than “sanctifying” the CMS into a separate location like MT does, but, happily, that issue has been covered in the wiki.)

Conclusion: I like WordPress a lot, and I’ll certainly be using it for future blog-based projects. But we’re just friends.

MovableTabulaRasa

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I’ve determined that in order to completely wipe all your Movable Type entries, comments, categorizations, trackbacks, and sent pings, while leaving configuration and templates intact, you need to truncate only the following tables in your Movable Type MySQL db:

  • mt_category
  • mt_comment
  • mt_entry
  • mt_placement
  • mt_tbping
  • mt_trackback

When that’s done, you have a virtual tabula rasa, into which entries, comments, and pings can be re-imported — assuming you remembered to export them from MT before embarking on this foolish endeavor of renumbering archived entries chronologically, under one category.

(Also, when importing entries into Movable Type from a text file, don’t hit Stop. It keeps going even if you try to interrupt the process, and if you try to do an import again while that’s going on, you end up with duplicates of everything. A long, slow process when you have 2,420 entries and over 3,300 comments.)

Soon: thoughts on WordPress.