I’ve spent the past couple of days installing and tinkering with WordPress on
Mark’s site.
WordPress is a funny beast - its extremely popular, it does a good job, yet
has some horrible
code problems - like too many global variables causing namespace conflicts.
There’s some very strange ideas - for example, the prefixing of many files/directories
with wp-, yet leaving constants and global variables without any
prefix (Yes, I did have a couple of clashes when integrating into the site’s
templating
system). WordPress could really have done with more design work putting in
at the start (wp-blog-header.php anyone?),
but I guess that’s also why it’s so good: it’s the paradox that well designed
projects take ages to
get anywhere (or don’t get anywhere) while the others grow and become popular.
Not always, but I can think of a fair few like this 
The other thing that bugged me was the directory names are hard-coded in -
I wanted to rename the admin directory for security and to something more obvious
than wp-admin (why the prefix again…?). To do so would have required over
130 edits!
Anyhow, enough moaning about the code - it works, and does what I want, so
I’m satisfied (none of the better-coded tools I could find seemed as advanced)
- and I’m sure there’s a moral in there as I look on my hard drive at the third
redesign of a project that’s been around for 9 months and got no further than
the code architecture (look back through this blog for RSS
Manager for earlier life).
The project in question was to give blogs to town councillors. Now councillors,
like 98% of the population, aren’t renowned for their computer skills, and
to make things easier I integrated HTMLArea into WordPress using Joe
Schmoe’s WYSIWYG
Hack For Wordpress (modified to work with HTMLArea 3.0RC1).
As these are supposed to be trusted people posting on the site, I’ve not bothered
with filtering the HTML produced, but that’s coming (unless I can find a script
someone else has written first!). But this is a digression…
One thing Mark wanted was for councillors to post images. An extensive search
turned up Wei Zhuo’s PHP Image
Manager, Image Editor for HTMLArea.
This looked to be just thing thing, and also used my Image_Transform library (so it must be good :)).
The Image manager interface
Installing it was very simple. Feeling pleased with myself (look at how easy
I’ve made adding images to a website!!) I decided to demonstrate how simple
it was to my parents (Look Mum, even you can manage…). Two minutes and two
blank faces later, I was forced into the realisation that it still wasn’t simple
enough. The menu bar in HTMLArea itself was too complex (to be fair I’d installed
a lot of plugins) and they had no clue how to use the Insert Image dialogue
- despite it looking like a normal Windows Open File dialogue. When sat at
the computer, neither of them could work out how to upload an image.