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First, hats off for making banner blog. I've made three blogging platforms for clients (one old one based on Zope, one based on Django and a static blog generator written in Go). Each time I've built one I'm always reminded of the depth of the rabbit hole, and each blogging platform was built because WordPress was bad at a certain thing, and the customer felt strongly that a plug in wasn't the answer (the first one, WP was young, the second wanted integration and workflow for their publishing business, and the last one was about generating a static blog site for performance). 1. The web really needs better tooling built into the browser for handling HTML input. I shouldn't need a giant ball of JavaScript to have a WYSYWIG HTML editor. It seems that there has always been a need to for editing stylized text, and right now there's not really a standard way to do it. There should be. 2. There's a lot more to a good blog site than just content. Navigation, categories, tags, search all are important for different bloggers. What's a podcast? A blog with video in the feed. What about ways to pay the blogger? Oh, then there's SEO, then there is internationalization, then there's accessibility, then there's syndication out and syndication in. All of it matters to some users and not at all to other users. The rabbit hole is infinitely deep. 3. On the web, output is so easy. Input is a lot more difficult for non-developers. Bringing a blogging platform's writing tools to parity with a 35 year old budget word processor (think Works, not Word) is a pretty expensive proposition. It's remarkable to me how much more capability an old Word Processor has than what we give bloggers. So, what about WordPress? Well, it is proof that good enough wins, and if you pile enough browser plugins with enough WordPress extensions, it works better than most other ways of doing it. |