Uncategorized – Confidant Communications Blog

Finally a WordPress rant

I received an email today announcing the JetPack CRM (a plug-in for WordPress) and something finally snapped.

I’ve been holding this back for some time because I know of many good developers and clients out there who I love and respect, who are enthusiastic users of WordPress to the exclusion of all other CMS’s. I don’t want to offend anybody, but sometimes the truth needs to be told. So what’s the thing I’ve been wanting to say for so long?

WordPress is designed to be blog software and people who want a truly versatile web platform should look elsewhere. Word. Press. It is a press for words and it is way overused on the web. There, I said it.

Peek Under The Hood
(non-tech-heads feel free to skip this)

Log into WordPress and look at the top of the side menu. “Posts” is the top item (assuming you don’t have Jetpack installed). Get to know WordPress at a technical level and you eventually start to learn about an important feature called The Loop. What is the main function of it? To retrieve and display Posts. Yes, Pages are a good WordPress feature and essential to a basic website. However, look in the database and you discover that they are simply a special kind of Post. If you get into WordPress development you will likely have to learn about other Custom Post Types, because many plugins will piggyback on this system to store their own special data. The paradigm of handling posts is irreversibly embedded in WordPress and affects everything else that happens. Developers of plugins often have to piggyback on that system or replace it completely with their own application framework of choice.

Posts are ordered by date, and at the time of this writing you still have to install a special plugin simply to have the ability for custom ordering of posts. It seems strange that a “web platform” doesn’t provide this out of the box, doesn’t it? For a blog however, it makes sense.

Maybe I’m being melodramatic, because I am also going to say that no matter what system you use, you must understand its limitations and know that the more you add, the more cumbersome it will become to administer. If all you need is a simple information or marketing site with some news updates here and there, WordPress is fine and its Gutenberg editor and media manager are very good. Like an iPhone it will be easy to use and serve you well for many years. I have recommended it more than once, and I use it for this blog. On the other hand, like an iPhone rigged up to function as an audio recording studio you will soon wish for a better solution if you try to go much beyond what WordPress does out of the box.

Nicholas Dionysopoulos, a longtime developer of both WordPress and Joomla software, put it very well when he said, “Not every site fits in the watered-down, content creator-centric approach of WordPress.” He said it while extolling some of the virtues of the upcoming Joomla 4 release. I personally will often choose Joomla CMS to build websites. It simply does more out of the box and is actually easier than WordPress to administer, customise, and bend to your will when you know how. However I will also add that not even Joomla is perfect for every situation. It also can become unwieldy when not managed properly. There are plenty of other good solutions out there in the same way as there are diverse problems to be solved. The secret is choosing the solution wisely at first and try to future-proof your solution as much as possible. Here’s some tips on how to do that:

Don’t be afraid of a learning curve

Be willing to learn a different system even if you are more comfortable with another. You learned it once already and you can have fun doing it again!

Decouple if possible, but only if the connections are good

While there are useful plugins for WordPress or components for Joomla, I often recommend using external services for certain features. For example, Mailchimp is bullet-proof for mass mailings and integrates nicely with a lot of other services. There are very good CMS-only stores which let you customise completely, but external stores like Ecwid or Shopify can be better sometimes. They are easy to integrate with many different websites and can make it easier for you to integrate with other systems such as Wal-Mart or certain dropshipping providers. Furthermore if you need to change your website CMS later on you will not suffer from so many migration woes later.

Don’t be afraid of minor expenses

A small investment in the right tools now can help you avoid more headache and expense in the future. This might mean paying a small fee for a high-quality plugin, or a small monthly fee for an external service. An elderly co-worker of mine once advised me, “the quality will be remembered long after the price is forgotten”. This is true.

Don’t be afraid to bring in the pros

Sometimes you don’t have the time to learn about all this tech stuff. If you tap into the right professional you can sometimes save hours of time crafting a solution. I was reminded of this today when I phoned a draftsperson about a potential house improvement project. He rattled off point after point of useful ideas to consider. I left wishing he had billed me for the advice.

Be tough on your web developer

Whoever builds your website, ask them for the rationale behind their tech decisions. If they only do WordPress, chances are it’s because it’s all they know. If the website is bundled with a larger marketing program, don’t be afraid to inquire about using another contractor for the technical work.

Conclusion

Where was I going with all this? Oh yeah. Please don’t use WordPress as a CRM. You owe it to yourself.

Building Kitchens in 3-D

I am very excited to announce the completion of the largest project ever done by Confidant Communications: the RTA Outdoor Kitchen Design Tool!

It’s been months in the making—an HTML5 application which lets you build an outdoor kitchen and view it using 3-D in your browser.

How was it built?

While a lot of our own planning, problem-solving and original coding went into this, this project stands on a huge foundation of indispensable technologies for which I am grateful. The biggest challenge of the project was choosing the best set of tools which would serve our needs both now and in the future.

Kitchen design tool appliance seletion step

First and foremost in the toolbox is Haxe, a 15-year-old open source language whose superpower is its ability to compile to many different platforms and languages. The design tool is compiled to JavaScript so that it can run in web browsers of many kinds. While there were other options for making applications, the versatility of Haxe combined with our existing skills made this one a logical choice.

Riding on top of Haxe is OpenFL, a cross-platform implementation of the API which originated with the Flash plugin. It is a bulletproof way of handling animation, graphics and multiple assets. It also ensures the application will be very portable if we decide to make applications for iOS or Android at a later time. I considered other Haxe display libraries such as Kha and Heaps, but the large amount of tools designed to work with OpenFL (including a workable 3D solution) made OpenFL the winning choice.

A very important part of the technology selection was finding a good way of converting SketchUp files into something the application could use, and having a strong tool for displaying and manipulating the models at runtime. I mentioned Heaps in the previous section. It was very strong in its ability to handle FBX models—something SketchUp could export easily. After much consideration and testing I decided that a two-step conversion of models into Collada format was going to be the best solution. Away3D is a mature 3D engine with parser for that format and I already had experience using it. Collada is human-readable and editable, which also proved to be useful for late-stage adjustments.

This open-source 3-D software was responsible for converting and editing models along with their textures.

PureMVC

As a fan of the MVC design pattern in coding, I have been using this library for many years. It has versions for 18 different programming languages, which is a testimony to the strength of its design.

Advanced Layout

Since this application does not use HTML for its layout (it uses an HTML canvas) it is necessary to provide some intelligent features to ensure all the page elements display nicely on every screen. This was the perfect solution.

Glory Framework

This is an application framework built by yours truly. It is strongly inspired by the Gaia Framework from the days of Flash, and it unifies OpenFL, Advanced Layout, and PureMVC in a page-based way of building websites and applications. It has been a hobby project of mine for a few years and this is its first real-world application. It has made the development process much more pleasant and I invite you to explore it for yourself!

Adobe Animate (a.k.a. Flash)

OpenFL is built upon the foundation laid by Adobe Flash, and I used the application to create the layout for the final quote screen and its text fields. This allowed me some freedom in design without having to do a lot of hand coding of those elements.

Thank You

To all the developers who put their heart, soul, and brains into all these excellent tools, I send a huge thank-you! I also am grateful to RTA Outdoor Living for their vision in making this project a reality!

If you have an idea for a similar project, please give us a call!

Sincerely,
Allan Dowdeswell

Defeating the Jargon Hydra

Jargon drives me bonkers. Biz speak, technobabble—whatever you want to call the esoteric language people use so often. Now maybe I am simply losing my capacity for advanced wording but when I take the time to decipher jargon I often discover that it is being used to obscure bad ideas or empty words. It seems I am not the only person noticing this. As a lover of truth this bothers me. So why does it happen?

1. We’ve become conditioned to skip over it

Technology is making our society communicate more briefly. In high school I was taught to write business letters using a typewriter, and they would always include a proper greeting, fully formed paragraphs, and a courteous sign-off. These conventions were the norm when I began using email 23 years ago, and it wasn’t long before I was doing double-takes when someone left out what I thought were the right elements. Then just when I became used to the brevity of email, along came Twitter and instant messaging and even more terse exchanges.

The problem is as we get used to quick information we get lazy about reading longer writing. Nowadays we tend to scan for the takeaway items and buzz words but skim over the words that we aren’t wanting to read (maybe you’re even doing it with this article). Anyway, even in our skimming our brains still register the fact that we have just experienced some high-fluting language and the suggestion is planted in our minds that because the author uses some big words they must have some worthy ideas even when we don’t understand them. The result is that the writer can fake their way through the social media scene or even into a scientific journal without really saying anything of value.

2. We let them get away with it

Even before electronic media people could still spout drivel. In college I had a lot of exposure to the arts community and would come across statements like this:

My work, which is figurative and symbolic in nature, explores the complex narrative of “being”. I am interested in the anthropomorphic as it associates to the human condition, where image, self and the subconscious reside and collide. Abstraction and figuration constantly intertwine facilitating a narrative that is subjective, idiosyncratic and coloured.

It would be much easier for them to say “I like blending human and abstract images. Use your imagination to gain your own meaning and feelings from it.” However, just like in The Emperor’s New Clothes, the artist convinces many people to nod their heads and pretend that the word salad they just read points to some much deeper meaning.

Perhaps we’re already sold on this person being a legitimate artist or maybe we just don’t care enough about being deceived. The hydra will simply grow two more heads if we attack this one. So we don’t challenge it (as Tom Wolfe did) and the artist keeps on selling their paintings to the uncritical.

3. We Chicken Out

Most people like to live in peace, and the sad fact is that challenging someone’s ideas carries the risk of offending them. Do it online, and you might even get a legion of like-minded people harassing you for a long time without even fully understanding why. Is it any wonder that we avoid conflict online?

Defeating the Hydra

When it comes to jargon, it is the truth and our valued time which are at stake. We should do something to protect these.

There’s some wisdom on the internet which says “Don’t feed the trolls.” There is much older wisdom which says both “Do not answer a fool according to his folly, or you yourself will be just like him,” and “Answer a fool according to his folly, or he will be wise in his own eyes.” These statements taken together give us a good start for engaging jargon-spouters. There is no one right method—we simply have to choose our battles wisely with the little time we have. Wash, rinse, repeat.

Do I think the hydra can be defeated? It depends on how you frame it. There’s all sorts of little hydras we can defeat every day. Very few people can change the world all by themselves but we all can do good works and have victories of our own. Choose wisely my friend, and fight for truth when you can!