Experimenting with WP 2.5. I must say, this is really fun
Well, I had a super busy weekend – everything from training a new customer in how to user her CMS to update her site, to stringing more fencing, to doing my taxes. And a big family event/party occurred in there as well!
Whenever I would get a spare minute I would sneak over to my laptop to work more on playing with WordPress 2.5, the new theme I bought (Revolution Pro Media, which will need a lot of “pretty it up” work, but has wonderful built in functionality), and the Tanbark Acres posts, which I have migrated over to my development platform.
Anyhow, the magic of these easy to use tools struck me as I thought to myself “I wonder how I can have a gallery of the youtube videos I have created?” Did a google search and found a plugin, installed it, created the page in WP and BOOM there was my gallery. It took all of maybe 5 minutes.
This is powerful stuff and revolutionizes not only blogging, but software development in general. We are truly getting to the point where the secret to good applications will be the business analysis (understanding what the customer wants/needs), graphic design, usability and customer support. The programming will involve knowing where to find the right applets and how to integrate them together seamlessly. It is like building a car… the engine comes from one place, the brakes from another, the seats from another. We, as buyers, do not care. We care about the quality of the overall car, the looks, the price, the ease of use. But we do not care whether or not car manufacturer XYZ built all the parts from scratch in the XYZ factory. In fact, we know that if this were the case, the blooming car would be outrageously expensive and probably not as good a quality. We’d rather have a car that may be assembled from different manufacturer’s components. Of course, it would be nice if the components were best of breed, whether the components be brakes, sound system, transmission or whatever. This is the way to build a great and affordable car.
And such an integration strategy is [finally] becoming the way of software (well, at least web) applications as well.
It’s similar for Java programming, too, and to a certain extent PHP. The only part of this that gives me pause is the IP licensing agreements for some of these libraries; in some cases simply including “free” code from someone else in your own project might obligate you to release all of your own custom code that relies on that code as well.