Well it was bound to happen, no longer can you do massive blogs on MT for free. This cements my decision to move away from MT for the UB blogs initiative. I’ve been playing with WordPress and it has me worried. I’m doing a moderately complicated page layout, and the use of a single template for much of the display, along with a lack of flexibility in what is displayed and how, makes me very worried about how well students will be able to customize their own blogs.
Don’t get me wrong, you can do whatever you want in WordPress. It basically provides the heavy lifting for the blog process, and I like what I see. But for some things, you basically need to be prepared to write in PHP. For example, I want to have a chunk between the first and second entries. To do this, it seems I have to write in a little counter that keeps track of the main loop and conditionally includes a chunk. OK, I’m no PHP wizard, but this is not a big deal–for me. When it comes to students, I’m a bit more concerned.
I guess the worst case is that they will have to live with the basics, maybe adjusting just CSS. It might motivate some to pick up PHP, which wouldn’t be too horrible a thing…
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Well it was bound to happen, no longer can you do massive blogs on MT for free. This cements my decision to move away from MT for the UB blogs initiative. I’ve been playing with WordPress and it has me worried. I’m doing a moderately complicated page layout, and the use of a single template for much of the display, along with a lack of flexibility in what is displayed and how, makes me very worried about how well students will be able to customize their own blogs.
Don’t get me wrong, you can do whatever you want in WordPress. It basically provides the heavy lifting for the blog process, and I like what I see. But for some things, you basically need to be prepared to write in PHP. For example, I want to have a chunk between the first and second entries. To do this, it seems I have to write in a little counter that keeps track of the main loop and conditionally includes a chunk. OK, I’m no PHP wizard, but this is not a big deal–for me. When it comes to students, I’m a bit more concerned.
I guess the worst case is that they will have to live with the basics, maybe adjusting just CSS. It might motivate some to pick up PHP, which wouldn’t be too horrible a thing…
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