September 9th, 2021 @ 1:22 am
i just updated one of my wordpress installs to the latest version (5.8.1) and when it was done, the latest update headline read “the next stop on the road to full site editing”.
as a web developer, one of my web 101 rules is that clients should NEVER have full site editing privileges. especially when it comes time to colors and page structure. this is how we end up with websites that look like a piles of disorganized horseshit OR geocitiesesque looking websites.
you might think i’m being dramatic, but at my first web job, my nerd boss (le swoon) built an editor where we would add tags to specific areas, to give clients editability (headers, divs, p tags, etc.). even at the most limited areas of editability, part of our job was cleaning up client’s code because they’d hit the bold button or italics button too many times. they would assign colors the wrong way, and a p tag would have nested several colors within it at once.
FYI: in HTML/websites, the regular/majority website text content (aka the text you’re reading right now) is a “p tag”.
<p>it looks like this in the code</p>.
when we setup websites, we assign style rules to p tags via stylesheets (an external file for all of your style rules in one place). for my p tag here, i’ve assigned the font-family (verdana font), the size, the line-height, the color (black aka #000000), font weight, etc. using a stylesheet, there’s no need to keep telling the browser what it should be every time there’s a new p tag (you can assign the rules inline on each p tag using the style attribute <p style=”font-family:verdana,sans-serif;”> if you wanted to, but no one does that anymore), with a stylesheet, there is one set of rules and it’s assigned for the entire site and only called once.
for example, within the <p> tag, our clients would have like…
<p><span style=”color:#FF0000;”><span style=”color:#FFFFFF;”><span style=”color:#FFFF00;”><span style=”color:#FF0000;”><span style=”color:#000000;”>some text</span></span></span></span></p>
…etc., this p tag has span tags with a few different colors, because the clients had the ability to change colors. i’m dumbing it down, i’ve seen where there were like HUNDREDS of lines of that, it was insane sometimes. i’ll be fair and say while the editor was injecting and not deleting the span tags, the person was still sitting there clicking these things, when they should have stayed within the color palette anyway.
when you have a website, you’re supposed to have a color palette and stick to it, not have all beiges and a highlight color (say, a dark orange and black) or two then stick A BRIGHT BLUE HEADING IN THE MIDDLE OF THE PAGE. this is why we tend to avoid giving creative access to clients, but i digress…
if in case you don’t know what wordpress is, tl;dr: wordpress is a free/open source CMS (content management system). it’s been around since the early 2000s and has been pretty much the same since its inception. it used to be for bloggers, but then it evolved into this CMS beast, hosting a large amount of the internet’s websites (WordPress is used by 41.4% of the top 10 million websites as of May 2021 – Wikipedia).
in 2018, for some idiotic reason, wordpress head honchos decided they were going to switch up the default content editor. without any input from the tons of developers that brought wordpress to more of a CMS platform than a blogging platform, just *poof* the new editor was there. a lot of people were pissed… me being one of those people.
out of sheer anger from reading that stupid ass installation confirmation headline, i decided to look at both plugins pages on wordpress.org to see how many active installs there were for “classic editor” and “gutenberg” to see if my argument against this newest bullshit is still valid. i usually check in once a year, to see if i’m still not alone in this, and i never am.
i hate gutenberg, and i will die on this hill. hopefully classic editor will still be supported for the future, because if i have to turn to the dark side, i’d rather chop off a toe and eat it.
anyways, if you’re not completely turned off by my nerd rant, here’s what the stats turned out:
read more…