Divine Lunacy

Albeit frames can be useful at times, they are generally a BAD web design practice and should be avoided by the average pseudo-geek, who is clearly lacks the skill to wield them.

The preceding was a public service announcement from someone who is extremely pissed off.

Thinking myself smart, I went coded a website in standards compliant XHTML 1.1, CSS, and a lot of PHP. The web site’s back end was driven by wordpress, with a few alterations, and a plugin to handle the meetings page. This architecture met the needs of the customer perfectly as the main objective of the site is to provide news updates to Pascoag Utility Customers. All of the pages were dynamic wordpress pages, and all of the news posts were wordpress posts. The previous practice of the Utility District was to email Mark Mingain, of M² web design when they wanted to update a page. The almighty webmaster, as they call him, would then edit a static HTML page to reflect the requested updates. It is my opinion that a customer should not need to email his host in order to update his web pages. Incorporating wordpress into the site was a way minimizing interaction between the “webmaster” (I use that term lightly.) and the customer. Updating was simply a matter of typing a post in the WYSIWYG editor, and clicking submit.

The situation turned out to be more complicated than I ever could have foreseen. The webmaster could not comprehend creating a MySQL database, and granting a user privileges on it, even given the incredible power of cPanel (a GUI back end). I spent an hour on the phone with the webmaster, and he still came short of giving a user privileges on the database. This phone call was indicative that the “master of the web” I was dealing with was in reality, nothing more than a pseudo-geek. When he told me to excuse him because the GRAPHICAL BACKEND looked like Greek to him, I knew that only time would tell exactly how deep his ineptitude ran.

And so I was right. Granting privileges to a database user turned into editing a very straightforward line of PHP (editing a string that was passed to the browser via the language construct echo.), and cringing as I read the following email:

It’s not that easy, since both web sites were programmed in 2 different languages the old (HTML) and the new (PHP).

What needs to be done is for PUD to review the NEW site ( http://www.pud-ri.org/iindex.php ) and the current one to see what pages/content is missing. Create a punch list of what needs to be added and/or deleted then Greg can make the necessary changes.

Once those changes have been made, Greg should then either publish the site to his development server ( http://pud.divinelunacy.com/ ) or zip/archive the code and email it to me and I will then post to the PUD development area. PUD will then review the site and changes and either bless it or make final adjustments, and then repost until PUD is satisfied.

Once the site has been blessed Greg will get me the code and I will then published and it will be in production.

Greg, if I missed anything please feel free to jump in.

Chris, hopefully I explained it well enough for you.

He was correct in stating that the new site used PHP, and the old one was merely static HTML, but he was wrong in saying that they were programmed in two different languages. I find it rather liberal to refer to coding HTML as programming, but I guess that’s just a matter of opinion. At any rate, the wording that he used puts PHP and HTML on the same level, despite the fact that HTML is a markup language and PHP is a programming language. (Not to mention the fact that my code was XHTML 1.1 compliant ;).) I made extensive use of CSS as well. I am also inclined to point out his tautological use of “and/or”. Or is a logical operator that returns true if either one or both operands are true. That is, the statement: Any person whose name is Greg or uses a Das Keyboard. describes me even though both conditions apply to me. We must remember that or is not synonymous with xor (either or). I digress…

When I finally gave up control of the site, the webmaster failed comprehend the purpose of the friendly back end. The wordpress backend was designed to allow the PUD personnel to edit their own website without interference from third parties. The update via email practice continued. It was about a month before everything was running perfectly (aside from the misspelling of Affiliates, which has yet to be fixed.) The last email I received from the PUD was a very climatic thank you sort of email. It sounded as though the new site would be fully operational within the next week or so. More than a month passed before I saw something that slightly resembled the website Joe and I worked hard to design appear on the PUD server. In the meantime, I noticed that the wordpress directory, and all of the PHP files had magically disappeared.

The new PUD web site may resemble the web site that I poured hours of love, and hundreds of lines of code into; those graphics might look like the ones Joe designed, but don’t be fooled, they are. The site makes fallacious claims that Joe and I made it. Believe me when I say: I don’t even know how to code a web page that has only 24 lines of HTML, but is 28 errors away from being compliant XHTML 1.1 (including the missing DOCTYPE.). Our design and our graphics were ripped off, but not a line of that website was coded by me.

Some people will never learn when it is appropriate to use frames. They are a useful tool, but they should not be used in place of CSS’s all-powerful styling capabilities. I highly recommend NOT using M² web design for anything other than satire. Go ahead and be a pseudo-geek if it’s the best you can do in life, but DO NOT shit all over my code. (Live Journal readers: Take note of the mood ;).)

This entry was posted on Sunday, December 4th, 2005 at 1325:14 and is filed under dev/tech. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.