Saturday, 31st o July 2004
Solutions that make sense
I've been working like a possessed madman on our web portal software ACES. It's a straightforward, no-nonsense web content management system driven by PostgreSQL (my DB of choice). It doesn't have threaded discussion, moderated talk back posts, a slick authentication system, a million and one cookie collection, javascript out the wazzoo, or RSS feeds. What it does have is a nice easy to use interface for a user to maintain his/her website. Want to edit content? Click on it. A form will open with a nice little word processor thingie with nice little buttons, a place to upload images, icons, attached documents etc. It's so stupidly simple, I get annoyed with it from time to time.
I want a big fancy portal system that's perfect. I checked out wordpress recently. It's a blog system designed for personal use journal writing, but it's really grown into a damn fine vertical community system, that is, a deep but narrow vein of pure gold. I played around with it for a day, marked up a style sheet or two, got the hang of where all the parts were to master the layout, but I eventually put it aside with a sigh. This program was obviously made by web professionals for other web professionals.
Standards compliance has mugged wordpress, beaten it to a bloody pulp and left it useless for other than web demi-god. The general public doesn't get semantics. They don't understand why simply making headers bold is a bad idea. They want pretty colors, big fonts, pretty fonts, a multitude of other hard-coded sins. Did Hemingway feel the need to put certain passages in bold? Did he change colors to make a point? He didn't even use pictures.
It's not that Wordpress is difficult to use, it's just that it solves a problem that people don't know they have.
I also tried out Drupal, the CMS that was used by Democratic primary candidate Howard Dean to run his grassroots network. It's a slick, high quality, fully integrated community portal, CMS, server application. It's also a tangled maze of jargon, clicks, and weird stuff. Maybe I'm not so smart, I think as I click around in a circle again. Haven't I seen that tree, that rock before. Perhaps one of my legs is shorter than the other and I am walking around in circles. From the couple of days I've spent playing with it, I do feel that I am well on my way to carpal tunnel syndrome. Yikes. Taxonomy terms, icons, sub-this, publish that... blah. This thing is a nightmare of usability, and that's me, albeit not the brightest monkey on the planet, but jeez this thing still suffers from the, "made by extremely smart people for extremely smart people" factory seal, locking it tightly up away from the unwashed masses.
I limp back to my little ACES portal system. I'm so sick of hacking on this thing. Maintaining software is a pain in the ass, writing in features you never expected on a client's request, adapting it to particular quirks of an organization or user, president, elderly secretary, fussy retard. Wouldn't it be great if I could just harness these Open Source hackers to write my CMS for me. I'll just adapt it, style it, and hand it over to the client. "Sorry, that's the way it comes in the package. If you want X feature you'll have to pay BIG for it."
But in the end ACES just turns out to solve a problem that already exists. Small businesses want websites. They don't have a lot of time. They don't get a lot of hits, but they want to make a good impression on the cheap. In short, they don't have a lot of time and money to make a lot of mistakes. If it's too hard to use, they won't use it.
ACES let's them click a link and edit their site, publish their
information and be done with it, which is really all 99.9% of people
and business want anyway. So I curse my fate and roll out an ACES
site, which the client loves and actually uses. In the end, I muse, the world is not made up of web-gods. It's inhabited by mortals, ordinary folks for whom banality is bliss. ACES is for them.