Yes. I was attempting to be a bit ironic there.

That's cool. Imagine having 11 reoccurring monthly payments and each update takes 15 minutes to an hour and you charge them $50-150 per update.

That's about $1,100/month for 7-8ish hours of work per month.

$150/hour without worrying about finding new clients? Lock me in all day dude .

I guess my problem is that I'm actually trying to serve my clients optimally and not lock them in for personal benefit.

irony detector is broken :/

like I already said that is entirely possible without lock-in.

I don't lock them in though, they are free to drop me at any point in time but they don't.

There's heaps of people out there who don't want to and don't care about updating their site. They want someone else to do it for them. They are paying because they don't want to be bothered to do it themselves. The last thing on their mind is wanting to be trained to use some system once or maybe a few times a month.

and you can do the same thing with wordpress and your updates will take 5-15 mins instead of 15-60

It is difficult to get a man to understand something, when his salary depends upon his not understanding it.

-Upton Sinclair

Disclaimer
Mods, didn't think this warrants a separate thread but feel free to move this post in case you feel otherwise.

I have a couple of picasa albums that I would like to share with people by providing them with a URL (sent to them through snail mail, so simply e-mailing x number of complicated urls for each album is not an option; the text on the sent card should basically read: ‘go to <easy url> to check the photos’).

I don’t really have web designing experience so my first plan was to create a basic html page that simply contains the links. Looks lousy but would do the job. Reading a bit more about this, it seems there exist some tools to easily incorporate picasa albums onto your own web page (pwi or PWA+PHP). This could be a nicer way to do things that is still doable for a noob like myself. In any case, it gives me some very basic web designing training/DIY experience

Questions:
1° Any preference in terms of possibilities or ease-of-use between pwi and PWA+PHP (or others?)
2° Best/easiest way to quickly create the webpage itself? I can write some very basic HTML in notepad but maybe there are better solutions (wordpress? PHP? …) that are not overkill and not overly complicated for basically creating 1 page (no experience at all with WP/PHP/CSS – basically anything beyond HTML – but willing to learn/explore a bit)
3° Any easy(ish) possibilities for some nice to haves (in order of how much I’d like to have them):
- have the captions from the picasa albums show up on the web page
- possibility for visitors to comment individual photos (without any login or anything like that, just allow them to choose a name and enter a comment)
- possibility to show/create slideshows of the different albums (maybe even with music?)
- possibility for visitors to upload their own pics in a separate album
- possibility for visitors to select some pics they would like to order an irl (printed) copy of. Maybe have some sort of thumbnail list of each album with checkboxes and then an ‘order’ button that basically creates a prefilled e-mail with the pic ids and they simply have to add the preferred format for each pic. Some kind of shopping cart thingy is probably nicer but it seems overkill (don’t think I’d have over 20 people ordering)?

Any pointers for any of this are much appreciated. Apologies for the long post about what is basically web design 101.

This. Any other business model is not one I'd be comfortable with.

Not all updates are just editing paragraphs inside of an existing page. When people don't update their site for a month and value their site, it's usually multiple little changes all over the place and occasionally new features.

If it were just updating a paragraph or switching an image somewhere it would take 5 minutes or less.

That time includes booting up a VM, making the update, checking it in multiple browsers, committing the changes to git, running a build script that runs tests + deploys it to a remote location on success.

Man, there are sites where that level of complexity makes sense. But most sites aren't that.

I just noticed Shoe Lace and I registered the same month. Weird.

There's no complexity though. I do all of my development in a linux VM. I think that's reasonable right? I don't want to corrupt my Windows installation with a lot of development servers/files and I prefer to host my sites on Linux so I might as well develop on the OS I deploy to. In a perfect world I would dual boot and be in Linux all the time except when playing games.

Making an update is as simple as opening the file in vim and saving the file. Committing the changes to git is 1 command which I run from within vim. Running the build script is 1 more command, everything else is automated.

It takes only a few seconds to navigate to the file I want to edit, paste in the edit, make a commit message and run a deploy script.

Doing development on a VM is a v good idea. One of the best (but often overlooked) features of a VM is that you can have pre-prepared images. Lets say you want to test your code on a vanilla webserver, you just load up a fresh image based on your pre-prepared webserver setup and off you go.

If your system is so efficient why is making a series of small changes a big deal?

How is it a big deal?

You seemed to be telling greg that it was.

Greg incorrectly assumed an update takes 15-60 minutes because the process of updating is inefficient, when in fact the time of the update was related to the content or functionality being updated, not the process.

Then you said it was complex and now a "big deal" when really it isn't.

I think there's way too much mythos about how "easy" a CMS is to use:

Myth 1- CMS is easy to update, all you have to do is install ABC module/plug-in/flavor. This is one of those things that are true in theory, but far from true in practice. Even though I use Drupal, which is considered more clean and sturdy than WP, it often happens that you can install a module and it does one of 4 things:

a) Breaks your entire site and you have to start over again, though this isn't really a common thing and shouldn't really happen assuming you are using Drush and other tools, but I can see this becoming a huge issue for someone with no experience.

b) The module installs, but it doesn't work because it is incompatible with the other modules you are using

c) the module simply does not work or hasn't been updated

d) the module needs 14 other modules to install with it as well, and this could of course loops back into a, b, c.

Myth 2 - CMS is easy to hand off to someone else or take as a hand-off from someone else.

I cry total foul on this one. Just because you know how to use the CMS doesn't mean everyone else does. I've looked at dozens of Magento sites, and even though Magento is famously secure out-of-the-box, I can tell you that about 75% of those I've seen fail at simple security vulnerability checks. If using the CMS was so easy, why is this an issue?

The issue is that in order for the assertion of easy-hand-off to be true, everyone has to be following best practices, but this most certainly does not happen. People "hack core" instead of using .info, .xml, or whatever files they should be using, thus creating even more spaghetti code, destroying the ability to safely upgrade, and yes, destroying the built-in security features of the CMS.

Myth 3 - Easy to learn

Definitely not the truth at all with Magento and Drupal, and I doubt that this is the case with WP as well. If WP was so easy to use and learn, then why do 90% of WP sites look like WP sites, and why would you buy a plug-in or theme instead of simply building your own? Why can't WP just be: hand-code some HTML5 and drop it into some file?

This is the part that stops me from considering CMS development over all other factors. The Definitive Guide to Drupal is 750 pages of small-print with a frustrating low amount of images. Of course, the opening pages admit that this guide is not definitive at all, but really something closer to a primer. Compare this to any RoR, Clojure, hell, even Java book with it's reams of code, and you find that you can do more much quicker with these languages than you can with a CMS, and none of these books come close to 700 pages.

My other issue is that the code is plain awful and tends to be bloated beyond belief. It disturbs me that 90% of the page-load with many CMS's is dangling code that doesn't do anything. Magento has a wopping 3,500,000 LOC, and each page load is how many lines of dangling JS on s site that doesn't use JS? And how do you remove all that dangling JS without hacking core?

I said in the other thread that my friend "develops" Magento sites, and she asked me if I could figure out a small issue. I had zero intention of helping her, but I was interested in seeing what the Magento base looks like:

file abc.php:

file abcd.php:


file abcde.php:

And this chain will go on for dozens of files.

Okay, there are quite a few benefits to CMS devlopment:

PHP is ubiquitous. I can go on all day with a customer about how I can develop a better/faster site in Python, etc, but how much is this going to cost in hosting per month? Why does someone want to pay $40/month for VPS hosting when they can get a shared host for $4/month with CMS pre-installed?

It is secure out of the box.

Generally easy-to-install modules and plug-ins, but I don't think that is all it's cracked up to be.

Built-in Admin interface. This is, in my opinion, the number one feature of a CMS.

I don't think that using a CMS is the golden key to fast development and customer satisfaction because it really isn't. If I was all about earning money, I'd surely spend the time to become an expert in Drupal or Magento development, but I'd rather spend the next 6 months doing something else.

If you have a customer who is semi-thinking show you a site map and a PSD or Vector drawing of what they want, what are you going to do? Three options seems to be most likely with most WP developers: Plug-in doesn't already exist so hack the core, tell the customer that it is too hard and they can't do that, or actually build the appropriate files to create the customized site and do it competently. I can guarantee you that the first too options are more likely. Would you want to be handed that one?

I think we've pretty well beaten this horse into a pulp at this point.

CMS's work wonderfully for tons and tons of sites. That is not a debatable fact. It just is.

CMS's are a tool. Like any tool, they can be used in an appropriate manner or they can be used as a hammer. They are not the appropriate tool in every situation but for many situations they are.

Also dave...you are without a doubt the MicroBob of Programming You should change your name to "daveT -v".

edit: just to be clear that is not meant to be negative. I enjoy your posts.

Dave, excellent post and I agree 100%

Seems a lot of WP bashing by those unfamiliar with WP.

if you can turn a PSD into html, it's almost trivial to make a WP theme. Maybe Magneto or Drupal are a different world, but imo it's rare for wordpress to "hack the core". Making a plugin is not hard.

Wordpress *is* easy for a lot of non-technical people to use. I've gotten people using with little difficulty who need handheld through all sorts of technical hurdles. To me that's a very big reason to use it. For the user to be able to use his own website.

I've had WP themes bring sites down to their knees too. My friend changed themes on his blog once and the entire site started to take 15 seconds to load. He ended up changing themes, but it seems crazy to me that the visual aspect of the site can negatively affect the performance of the site that bad.

CMS themes and modules suffer the same problem as jquery plugins. More often than not some random idiot coded it and it's 98% garbage. I don't want to be forced into investigating every line of code for every module just to make sure it's not broken.