In general, how to I find out how to change something?

  • Sounds like a vague question, I know. It’s the kind of question that does not get asked enough because people tend to focus on the problem at hand rather than how to make it easy to fix things.

    Say you are looking at some automatically generated content. You want to know:

    1. Which plugin or widget or whatever caused this to be here?
    2. How do I edit the template or shortcode or whatever created it?
    3. What pages would be affected if I changed this?

    Some systems like Zope/Plone make this kind of information available. Does WordPress give you any way to navigate these kinds of questions?

    If you want me to be more specific, you are missing the point.

Viewing 4 replies - 1 through 4 (of 4 total)
  • Moderator Ipstenu (Mika Epstein)

    (@ipstenu)

    ?????? Advisor and Activist

    Moving out of Alpha/Beta for one…

    Normally I search the plugin files for the phrases. Or turn off plugins until I find that one. But it’s a pretty esoteric question, in that the answer is “You look for it.”

    I did osme (very) basic work with Plone in a previous incarnation, so I think I understand what you’re looking for. In Plone there’s a setting that shows extra markup on the front end that gives “directions” as to the template/function/class/etc that is displaying each part of the pages layout. If that’s what you’re after, I’m sorry to say but there’s nothing like that in WordPress.

    I can’t talk for the developers but in my mind I would think that that’s because it is a whole heap of extra code for something that’s not an integral part of the system. The main ideal behind WordPress as oposed to Plone is that it’s small, simple, and doesn’t include anything that’s not required. That’s almost completely opposite to something like Plone that includes everything that it can and ends up being a bloated nightmare unless you really understand what you’re doing.

    Thread Starter LobsterNinja

    (@lobsterninja)

    Well, that’s a good point. In fact, I suppose that’s probably why I don’t use Plone any more. (Actually it’s perhaps more about Zope’s tendency to reinvent every wheel in computer science from scratch, starting with the filesystem (i.e. ZODB)). But I digress.

    Anyway, yes that’s exactly what I’m after, but I will concede that adding a few features of that type might involve sacrificing the crispiness of WordPress. Maybe you can’t have it both ways.

    However, I don’t think the following is too much to ask: Suppose, for example, I’m using an event management plugin, and I’m editing an event. Typically, only a select set of fields are exposed including the main body of the event page. It would be really nice to have easy access to the page template for event pages too (subject to permission constraints), or more generally always expose a link to the template for any object being edited.

    I agree that there’s some things like that that might be nice, but in reality… unless you’re a “power user” you really don’t care about all that. Clients that I deal with don’t know – and don;t want to know – what is controlling it all. They want to be able to do their updates as they know how, and that’s it. From what I’ve seen that’s the same with every CMS. Where I used to work using Plone, we had around 80% of clients come back to us for every update only because they didn’t care about how it happened, they just wanted it changed and it wasn’t worth their time to go looking for it.

    that’s one thing that I think that WordPress does right. It’s either done right (depending on the developer…) or it’s not done at all. It’s a pretty common “feature”… give your average person more idea of how to do something, and they’ll have even more ways of doing it wrong!

Viewing 4 replies - 1 through 4 (of 4 total)
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