MT Migration and philosophical musing

Well, yeah WP looks great BUT…
Been there, done that, got an attempted smack down from some community members. Do a search, this topic has been opened and shut according to those working most on WP.
I am still on the side of better programmatic practices for WP. A few rants below…
There is data(content), there is structural markup(html), and there is presentation(CSS) — the goal of building good, accessible, standards compliant sites is not to brown shirt an idea (a list of links ought to be structurally marked up on output) into existence but to separate all the layers.
WP fails to separate (or failed to last I tried) and insists on building programmatic functions for data calls with hard coded structural markup. It’s absurd to argue for this.
I am also miffed by the documentation and depth of the template tags. It seems the depth of the template tags is hindered by some pre-conceived notions of what is proper. While it may be proper markup, IMO it is not proper programmatic practice.
How hard does it have to be to build a separate list of post titles that are of category A while having the main body of the weblog be categories B,C,D,E,F,G,H but not category A? MT allows for this functionality simply by being flexible and generous in the verbs it gives a designer to work with…
Perhaps it is my noobness with PHP but I really want to learn. Perhaps it is a lack of understanding of the loop and how various things interact within WP but discovering this stuff shouldn’t be as tricky as it has been.

My original reason for posting:
WP is hard to use from a designers point of view. Forget MovableType or any other blogging app. We’re talking about WordPress. It’s hard to use.
Hard heads make things that are hard to use. Always.
Are the developers even considering the end user in terms of what is shown versus the user spending hours on support forums trying to discover what OTHER code is being generated by WP?
What has been the cost in person-hours answering user questions based on hidden markup being generated by WP?

Thanks Allusion.
I’m not opposed to learning PHP calls, syntax, etc. That’s one of the reasons I (and I expect many others) want to use WordPress.
I think that some user testing wouldn’t hurt WordPress. Strides are being made, and that’s definitely good.
What about people who aren’t Dave Shea or Doug Bowman? I would class them as experts and the other 98% of designers somewhere below. That’s why I commented in the first place. I’m glad that this dialogue has been allowed to continue…

“I think part of the problem is people are using template tags for things that aren’t really templating because in other system template tags are all you have.”
Yes!! The post variables are what I was looking for (though I didn’t know it at the time). Just spits out the data without touching it. It would be great to have a more integrated help system ala MT, little ?’s in the UI that lead to pop ups… they were helpful in showing me what related options there were that didn’t belong in the UI itself. I know documentation in and of itself is a concern at the moment, but this would save admins and regulars from having to deal with support as much. Personally I didn’t know what I needed so forum searches and some wiki browsing were enlightening but didn’t give me what I wanted.
<?php echo "$post->post_content"; ?> is what I was looking for, I was getting frustrated with<?php the_content(); ?> Since I barely know any php I’d rather deal with layout on the html/css level if possible, learning php is going to be a somewhat gradual process. ??

FWIW, I was an MT user for 2 years. I was an early donor. I loved the script. But, I switched to WP in April because, in my opinion, MT was too limiting and I didn’t like their templating/tag system.
I am not a programmer, though I learn to work through the system I am using.
I post this only as a comment that at least one end user really likes this sort of system and is quite happy with it.

I’ve been taking another look at MT’s template tags, since that is your frame of reference, but I really see them as just different, not really better or worse. The PHP start and end is more verbose than MT’s psuedo-tags but there are shortcuts for that in PHP. The other difference is that MT requires custom logic tags for different data where in WP the structure would always be the same. You may want to check out this article:
The WoPre Tagging Series
It lists some equivilents between MT and WP template tags. There’s no reason this couldn’t be taken to its logical conclusion with an equivilent for every relevant tag in the MT manual. Sounds like a good project for the wiki.

Just wanted to note that while I am familiar with programing, I have only very limited experience with PHP.
All in all, I’ve spent more time trying to learn MT’s template tags and getting MT to do what I want than I have spent learning PHP. Still, I’m having no problem adjusting to WP.
Even if WP used template tags, they wouldn’t be exactly the same or behave the same as the MT ones do. Template tags or php, either way you are going to have to get used to a new system.
The main problem that WP has is not the php for template tags but that it’s documentation isn’t complete yet. Better descriptions of what some of the tags do would help a lot, but I can see that it is getting better and holes in the user docs are being filled in over time.

Again, this is less about the logical structure of tags, but about the difficulties in bending WordPress. Here’s a good read:
https://phoat.com/2004/05/25/wip/

Thanks allusion, for the link to variables available inside the loop. That will help me out a lot!
Thanks for the clarification and continued discussion, its helpful. I agree that having to learn PHP to do basic design changes is a bit disheartening if someone doesn’t already know PHP, but I think the user friendlyness is something that will improve with time.
Its common to have to trade power for user friendliness, but good testing can provide a common ground that lets people who are willing to learn a little do a whole lot, which is a point things are reaching now, especially as we get more documentation.
peace,
sam

thanks for all the great responses — can’t wait to dig in… I moved from MT because I knew it was limited in a way, wanted to learn more PHP rather than Perl (nothing wrong with perl but PHP is more a more accessible language to me), and WP looked great.
Documentation will help things along and I suspect the wiki is the place to try and help.

Thanks dj blurb for expressing what I have felt about WP since the start, I couldn’t agree with you more. Rino and phidauex have also made great points and given examples which illustrate the problem with WP from a non-php geek’s POV. My own thread is another example…which I still have not really solved (help)
Most of us love clean code, and would agree that “code is poetry”. But shouldn’t we be allowed to make it or break it on our own? I think it’s great that the makers of WP are web standards, XHTML freaks. So am I, but I think that the WP approach is a bit extreme and that it causes a lot of problems that can’t be addressed with CSS. Maybe with some preg_replace/strip/regular expression stuff, but that is out of reach for me.
I hope the authors of WP take up this “religious” debate themselves and see where it leads. I think by providing some great “default” templates they could illustrate the value of creating clean, standards based markup without forcing it as such.

I think part of the problem is people are using template tags for things that aren’t really templating because in other system template tags are all you have.

To be fair, until the list of $post variables was made available on the wiki anyone could be forgiven for assuming that the function calls were all they had to work with. Personally I agree with Rino that the introduction of unnecessary markup into functions is bad practice, but at least now we purists have been informed of the alternative. Actually I find that WordPress is a lot more flexible than it initially appears to be. It just takes some digging and lateral thinking to find the best way of doing things.

Oops, talking about fixes, I used unclose HTML list tags in my last post I broke the layout, sorry ??