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July 29, 2003
Manila
I'm messing around with Manila/Frontier for the first time. Can I just say that this thing is a big weird mess? The terminology used, and the resulting mental model of the system, is so frigging wrong I can't follow it. Blog-like posts are "news items", categories are "departments", and to get a list of news items by department you create a "story" and use a macro to list things in it? And I can't even get a simple list of my current categories without going into a drop-down menu?
Not to mention UI gaffes like: page templates are stuck inside a hugely overloaded "Prefs" section (except for the templates you edit in other sections of the Admin UI), some things called "templates" are really just tiny little one-liners, and user management is awful.
I know there are lots of powerful features under the hood, but they're mostly there to make programmers'--not users'--lives easier. This thing has some serious stumbling blocks to learning it. Considering the competition, why bother? (Except that the client's already bought it...)
Posted by Andrew at July 29, 2003 02:49 PM
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And oh my god, could they have tucked html code away in a few more secret spots deep within the app? Where do I edit the code for the /aggregator page?
Posted by: andrew at July 29, 2003 04:23 PM
Abandon hope, all ye who enter here. You've stepped through the looking glass, my friend.
Posted by: jjg at July 29, 2003 05:40 PM
I still recall the first time I tried Manila. I commented out a template using standard HTML commenting syntax, only to break the rendering so badly it took a Userland sysadmin to go in and change things back for me.
They're response to this bug, "Don't do that."
Posted by: Cam at August 1, 2003 01:03 PM
For the record, similar comments are at http://www.winterspeak.com/2002_01_01_archive.html#9206254" and the post Cam's referring to is at http://www.camworld.com/archives/000956.html"
Posted by: andrew at August 1, 2003 01:26 PM