*Plagiarised from a friend, but stupid here plagiarised it wrong…

So I’ve finally finished the design. Took longer than I expected, even when disregarding my recent days of laziness and delays. Wordpress seemed to make it as difficult as possible to create the theme the way I wanted to. Let me know what you think of it and of any bugs you find.

Anyway, pending other work, my fight against “CMS oppression” will be able to resume when I start working on CMS Fortheinter.net soon. I decided last night that I’m going to make the administration independant, rather than inline. Inline is easier in some regards, but would also be a pain in others.

For example, a site like Xpertwebsite.com (who I do work for), doesn’t have a sidebar. How would you get to the administration without a more generic navigation? How would you integrate the administration into an 99.9% AJAX based design like that? It wouldn’t be easy, and the quick CMS I made for that site has an independant admin.

The other factor is performance. I’ve noticed that all these administrator permission checks going on in the modules are slowing down the system quite quickly. While some permission checks are going to be necessary, it seems daft to be burning performance away on something that will be accessed considerably less than the actual content.

Making it independant allows me to play around with AJAX more in the administration too. If it was inline, I’d have to remember that someone will be changing the theme and use less AJAX, which in turn makes the administration a little harder to use.

The final benefit is one that has bothered me from the start. If the theme is broken, by poor coding or an update that changes the code, the site owner couldn’t use the administration to change the theme to the default while they fix their own design. Which would obviously be pretty bad. So an independant administration seems the right way to go.

Hope I haven’t bored you too much with that lot.