Tunaslut

So, I decided, for better or worse, to play around with Expression Engine a little bit. I don’t know why. Maybe I got bored with WordPress. Maybe I just wanted to try something different. Maybe I’m experimenting. Who knows. Anyway, I go about installing EE, which is obviously not as easy to do as WordPress….by which I mean, you need to set up your database yourself and do all the uploading through ftp etc etc…..call me spoiled, but with WordPress being such a de-facto standard, my webhost has a one click install for it which does everything for me. Not that I’m complaining, it was far from difficult to do, though probably not the sort of thing your nan would be comfortable with. You know, setting up a new mysql database and user and all of that is not something the average non-techy person should need to do in this day and age. Of course that sucks if you just want a blog on your webspace and you don’t feel like paying someone to install it for you, but you know, thems the breaks (you could always hire me to get you up and running – I’m not cheap, but I am good ….eh who am I kidding, I’m cheap like a two dollar tunaslut, but I’m so good you’ll keep coming back for more ).

Anyway so I install the old EE and decide to mess around with setting and such. First thing I notice is my blog title is all wrong. It says “Default Site” or some such out of the box. Now, from my cursory glance, EE is not a single site blogging tool like WordPress, but a multiple site type affair. Or at least that’s how it’s been set up from what I can glean from a quick look at the database structure (yah…read the manual? pah! who does that). So I decided to change the name of my blog to something more suitable, so I hit up the Admin panel, and go to Weblog Administration and Weblog management (ooooh you can set up more than one blog per site….interesting for you IM people out there…..). Then I boldly change my site name and short name to something new. Then, my site disappears. Not like the admin panel, just, you know the blog – the template is there, but the blog posts aren’t showing and the blog name is absent.

Bah. I hate it when that happens. So I start to dig around a little. Now the good thing about Expression Engine is that you can simply turn on some debugging options and watch the sql output…..which I do, only to find that for some reason, to display my blog, the select is looking for a weblog short name of “default_site”. See, short name – that’s what I changed…..baaaad apparently. So this is a bit unfriendly really. I think maybe a little inline help could solve a lot of problems right there – I mean I don’t want to read a lot of user manuals to get going. I know the concept of blogging – I just want to get things up and running and go from there…..I’ll learn the ins and outs later. EE, if you are listening – put a little note next to short name in the options to stop people doing what I did (or at least warn them). I bet a lot of people have installed EE, done what I did, and found their blog gone…..and then…..decided it isn’t worth it, ditched the software and gone back to wordpress. Hate to say it but it’s true, WordPress is the most likely platform people are coming from, make it easy for them to get into your software and they will be more likely to stick around.

Tags: Tags: blogging, expression engine, user experience fail, wordpress
Topics: Software
Date: Wednesday, May 26th, 2010 9:11 pm