These past few days, I’ve been looking for some CMS to publish a new online magazine (Wisp) we’ve been planning to launch for quite some time.
Searches for the best management tool is never something easy, because basically, there isn’t such thing as a “best” management tool.
There is a variety of tools available on the market, and hopefully among them, one which will suit your needs almost perfectly. To find those most suited candidates is like finding a delicate balance between easiness to use, functionalities, expandability etc.
Read more (if technically inclined)
So far, I’ve been very satisfied working with Textpattern which is (for me) one of the best management platforms for personal sites. It is elegant, simple to use, and is very adaptable, which is for me something quite important, as I don’t really like the out-of-the-box look that you can find on many sites. It must be mentioned that WordPress is also a very good and easy piece of software, essentially for setting up blogs, though not with the level of customization allowed by Textpattern. It’s doing an excellent job on the focusphere.net sites. I’ve been using Textpattern on elikozoe.net for more than 2 years, and now also on araili.net. But as good as Textpattern is, there isn’t the level of expandability I wished for that new site, and as I didn’t want to stick to softwares just because I’ve been used to them for so long, so I looked at others,… again.
After a look at all the bloated ones, I found a little barely known piece of software (PacerCMS) which seemed perfect for my needs (an unpretentious e-zine). After having toying with it, I realized that, considering its very small community and lack of modularity, it would be difficult to integrate it with more functionalities.
So finally, I opted for Drupal, which I had already considered two years ago for my site. At that time, it had seemed to me impractical, burdened with a lot of inextricable functions, though very well coded.
I was wondering if my previous biases against it would still stand, especially after all the praises the software got. In fact, it was and still is now very popular, running some heavy-traffic sites like firefox (or flock), and perhaps equally praised as it is despised by developers.
So, on the one hand, Drupal (with its e-publish module) seemed like the logical answer to my needs, and on the other hand, it felt like a new cooking robot with full of functions and buttons, most of which I would not need for the moment, and with an instruction booklet thick as a phone book.
Nevertheless, I installed it and tried to play with it to set up some basic appearance that would give an idea of what we were trying to do. At first glance, most of its administration menu didn’t make much sense to me, as it is unlike anything you usually find around.
I had installed a module which could group and order all the options into tiny menu boxes at the top of the website, but hadn’t realized how useful it would be, and was about to drop the whole thing in frustration —I couldn’t make a satisfactory simple looking page with that software, while I did it manually in a mere handful of minutes. That would be like not knowing how to tell that brand new expensive cooking robot how to make a simple omelet.
And then, among the helpful comments made by the community of Drupal users, I found this one in a signature:
It really cracked a smile out of me.
First, because I don’t believe that there is such an “old Chinese saying” (I did make some unfruitful searches, and the title of the post is an ironic 做到成功 which would mean “do till you succeed”). As though everything sounds better if that’s good ol’ Lao Tzu who said it.
Second, because I was like “oh, that’s perfect then. I must be really close then,… like really REALLY close!”
And then I went back to the interface, and started to look at the simple menu. And it all did start to make sense. It was like this menu was doing what I was wanting, which was to hide the unnecessary functions.
When you think of it, most of your computer softwares act like this thanks to some interfaces best practices. Take Photoshop for instance (not to speak about 3D softwares), it has tons of functionalities, and frankly, most of us normal to just-above-average users don’t get to use half of them. And we don’t want to have our interfaces cluttered with useless stuff. It just catches our attention and makes us wonder what it’s about, whether it’s fundamental or not.
It’s like when we go to the supermarket. For the past two years, I was going to a very small local supermarket, where you get the basics, and a few extras, and once you’ve taken notes of the hours where you can avoid the rush (and the grumpy elderly ladies), it isn’t too exhausting to do a refill of groceries.
Now that I’ve moved, we get the advantage of having a big hypermarket next to the apartment, and sometimes it really gets tedious, because you get all these department-long choices, and if you don’t pay attention, you find yourself stopping to just go and put things in your basket because you need them, to rather get through all of the choices and ask yourself “do I need that or not?”.
Takes a little practice not to be a total wreck when you come back home 
People whine most of the time that they don’t have choice, while truth is, they are overwhelmed when they get confronted with unlimited choices. It’s enough for them to know the choices are here.
Most people fret over not winning the big lottery check, while they wouldn’t know in the first place what to do with such an insane amount of money (and you can bet they will pretend the contrary — give it a try, ask yourself, genuinely, start to imagine, what will be your first act with that check in your hands… You start to get lost in details.)
Anyway, the old wise Chinese was right on spot. Stop looking at all the other possible paths while you’re so near to be done with the one you’re ploughing at. Perhaps next time you’ll do it a little more gracefully…
This is my personal blog/portfolio where I discuss a variety of subjects, from technology to arts (graphical or culinary), metaphysics or Chinese culture. 
Recent Comments