There are thousands of high quality Wordpress Themes available on the internet. In fact, there are so many that only the prolific number of sites powered by Wordpress could even come close to re-using them all. The theme I was using was supposed to be temporary when I put it in place in mid-2007. Here it is 2008 and I was still on it. I had to change it to give my site it’s own look.
The latest iteration of Wordpress (2.6.1 at the time of this writing) provided a pretty significant upgrade from 1.5. Why not change when Wordpress itself was going through a bit of maturation?
Wordpress is, by far, the easiest blogging tool I’ve ever used. I would even go so far as giving it my “Grandma Safe” approval. Developing a theme was a joy. The documentation and tutorials that Wordpress keeps on their site is absolutely incredible. I never felt lost or confused doing everything from integrating custom functions or using built in tags to drive this site. Where the Wordpress site didn’t provide enough examples there were the themes and templates that came with the Wordpress installation.
This got me thinking about the nature of software customization and the question that keeps coming up in my mind is: Why doesn’t all software include well documented customization options?
Vanilla Wordpress, the Kubrick theme, is plenty for most people. If Wordpress never offered customization features I think it’d still be my recommendation for a blogging platform. That said, the customizations and plugins that users have created for use with Wordpress takes it to the next level.
Why wouldn’t this work with Microsoft Excel?
Surely there’s room for plugins to traditional softare applications! Look at the pages devoted to the development of complex formulas for Excel as proof (349,000 according to Google). What if there was a natural language formula builder that someone could just download and plug in to Excel? So much of technology is learned, “just in time” that I don’t feel like software is meeting the user’s needs.
The vanilla product should always cater to the specific audience that the application should reach. Limiting people from taking a product to the next level, however, seems counter-productive and intuitive.
Consider Microsoft Excel for a moment. This falls into the category of “personal productivity” software. I’m not sure who made that jargon/marketing term, but it’s vague at best. Excel helps you organize data. Data is not as neat as rows and columns with formulas. The true geeks are screaming, but what about VBA?
I would agree that VBA allows you extend any Microsoft application, but how intuitive is it for hobbyists?
The second quality of customization is how accessible this is to the hobbyist and professional. For example, Wordpress’ extensive documentation runs the gamut from step-by-step tutorials to mere API reference. Further, Wordpress customization can be as simple as HTML & CSS or as complex as writing full blown PHP plugins. Some people have even revamped how Wordpress works completely in this manner like the K2 plugin.
This is where Excel really fails the customization crowd.
Ideally an application would either meet a specific niche need and be set in stone or serve a more general purpose and be highly customizable like Wordpress.
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