- The time for change is here, now, in America.
It’s going to be a fascinating and marvelous New Year: Dems are in power, Obama seems to be heading in the right direction in terms of fixing the financial mess we’re in and currently I am looking for a new instructional design job.
Yes…my time with the Silicon Valley startup is done. It’s was fun while it lasted and I learned a lot of new things and even won that video award. THAT is truly a resume gem if there ever was one and deservedly so… Everyone on the team worked hard on it and we were all under extreme pressure to get it done at the highest possible quality.
In any case, now is the time for me to update this site and finally upload a few things of distinction. So…onwards and upwards for 2009 for everyone and expect the site to change a little bit in the coming weeks. Things to look out for: a piece on e-portfolios with a little bit of multimedia thrown in, LOTS of new videos, some technical writing pieces and a few more pieces of standalone training (Captivate, Camtasia, etc…). Now that I have a little time, I can probably delve into new WordPress thingies for this site (I simply ADORE 2.7.1 and the improved back-end functionality — ANYONE can run a kick-ass site from the new control panel).
I still think that WordPress is the bomb and Joomla continues to be my passion and oh yeah…still scratching my head about what Drupal is all about. I know that last comment will get me in trouble with all the Drupal heads, but still…why does Drupal, even at it’s very best, look like WordPress yet all the basic things that should/could/would do it a royal pain in the arse?
Funny bit: I called up a buddy the other day and we talked about Drupal. Seems his web development shop is pretty high on the Drupal now. When I was a web dev intern at this shop a few years ago ( in grad school), they didn’t know about CMS and Drupal until I turned them on to the concept and now apparently, a lot of the staff is now pretty heavily involved with it. A lot them are now Drupal developers and have taken up learning php in a significant way to make changes to their projects.
I can honestly say that I did bleed a tremendous amount trying to learn Drupal and, hell, this here site was once Drupal for at least a year and a half (thanks to Drupal for a high Google rating). But that all changed when I saw WordPress (synthesized chorus and shimmering bells here..). Now, I have known about WordPress for a while by that time but didn’t really get into the technical aspects of it, so I had very little understanding about how easy it can be to install and maintain it.
You see, I was having trouble upgrading Drupal and trying to do this made me nuts because Drupal is VERY DRUPAL — ya gots to do what Drupal wants you to do in order to get things done. This is clear in the way they use terminology, programming methodology, php classes….eckhh.. By this time in my adult life, I think I had quite enough of yet another scripting language and did not care to learn one more just so I can update the stupid template on my Drupal site. Now, this is not to say that I don’t know php…I do know php but ‘just enough’ so I can work with MySQL and the myriad templates, modules and new functions that a modern CMS can give you. Everyone who works with an out-of-the-box CMS knows that you have to know just a little bit of php and database to get by. It’s just that with Drupal you gotta be damn good with it to make it work the way you want.
Then WordPress…
Let me say that I did look at WordPress years earlier and that version was not easy to use: custom tags within your text, upgrade required FTP access and carefully uploading new files to overwrite old ones, dB connectivity was…weird.
Then WordPress grew up and BECAME EASIER TO USE! 
This is the key to getting people onboard with the CMS thing. It’s gotta be E-Z 2 USE. Easy to use.
WordPress is…easy to use. Granted, if you want to have your own website you have to know how to login to a CPanel type backend on a Linux server just to upload the free software onto your rented space and then unzip it into the file system and a couple of more techie type tricks to make it work. However, once it’s up and running, all of your upgrades and configuration (well…NEARLY all) will be from the front end. Currently WordPress seems to be making upgrades, tune-ups and add-ons easier with automated scripting. It’s almost a no-brainer.
In any case, I’m so into WordPress and managed to get my complexion back after the Drupal bloodletting. I am also into Joomla…but that’s for another blog.
Happy New Year y’all and if you got a need for an instructional designer like me…drop me a line.
1.20.2009
