WordPress Brainstorm
Here is the deal with WordPress (for anyone thinking of getting into it).
We have the usual suspects. The “open” nature of the beast invites plenty of people do put on a show like Mickey Rooney and Judy Garland.
What?
So everybody has their “theme” that costs money, ya know. But they put a castrated version “out there” to be “tried” in the manner of share-ware.
But it’s limited. The “free” themes have just ONE menu.
Now, since this “app” is basically ALL MENUS just having ONE menu means that it is seriously, seriously handicapped. It’s basically just a demo. Come one, you cheap bastard, buy the real version. Pay up.
However…
If you are really, really clever you quickly discover that there is another way to make a buck, or show off your chops to potential employers, or both. You make a thing called a “widget.”
A widget does something cool in the program. It tracks this. It sorts that.
But seriously– what is the giant gaping hole that needs to be filled? It ain’t a way to sort photos of pooches. It ain’t a program to morph your photo into your pooch.
No.
The big hole is MENUS. So here come the zillions of widgets that sneak “extra” menus into free themes via the back door. Yes, my friends, for all the cheap bastards out there, the widgets, most of them, supply all those menus that you NEED but don’t have because the theme you have is the free version you got from a Japanese vending machine.
But.
The widget menus are a hack, and WordPress is constantly smackin’ the hackin’ by changing up shiz-nit left and right so’s the people who need to get paid get paid. But still– the widgets pour onto the “market” with more menus that may or may not work, all because somebody (me) doesn’t want to pay for it.
I’m telling my loyal readers this because although it sounds OBVIOUS now, this is hard as hell to uncover when you’re trying to learn to set up a WordPress website/blog and you can’t understand why menus are in TWO places and seemingly operate in two totally unrelated ways. It seems nutty.
But it’s just the result of capitalism and human nature. For every respectable Hester Prynne there’s a Reverend Dimmesdale to come along and f*ck it all up.