The enterprise vs. freelance/consultancy split.

From my point of view, in researching how to set up our WordPress infrastructure, the WordPress community can be neatly divided into two camps:  the freelancers and consultants who make their living on WordPress and for whom it’s professionally beneficial to blog about technical concerns, to answer questions on help sites, and to speak at WordCamps – and the folks with jobs in the “enterprise” who are using WordPress as a tool rather than as a career.

The latter set doesn’t say much out in public about their work. They don’t need to promote themselves, and they may be hamstrung by corporate policies that frown upon speaking about one’s work in the public sphere.

Continue reading “Community Fatigue” →

So I’ve been working on the intranet at my company since the home page was just a bulleted list.  I marked up the first graphical version of the home page.  Our web browser at the time was Mosaic.

I’ve watched it sprawl and sprawl.  Our search index is something like 1 million documents and that’s with aggressive pruning.  Most of the intranet has never been governed. In conjunction with a colleague in Internal Communications, I’ve been keeping a reasonably well-edited list of deep links into those million-plus documents that has swelled over the years to about 500 links. Everyone loves the links list, because it’s the only reasonable way to navigate that big pile of stuff.

Continue reading “No one’s second WordPress project should be this complicated, Part 1” →

In 2000 there wasn’t much out there, so I wrote my own. I learned PHP. I wrote a system that stored everything in structured text files we could upload over dialup from the road.  “As live as possible,” was our motto.  We drove out to New Mexico in a VW and documented the trip.

Then there was Greymatter, written by Noah Grey.  His site was beautiful and so was his code.  It was the first time I ever modified someone else’s software.

And finally there was Moveable Type.  It could be tricked into behaving as a web CMS, which I did a few times.  I used it for many different sorts of sites.

Continue reading “Blogging software I have known (and hacked)” →