I normally don't do web programming. What follows is a newbie's experience with
what appears to be very popular content management systems, more specifically,
their piles of PHP/CSS crud that are called "themes" in the related jargon. The
hate is fresh and immature and thus could easily be misattributed (in
particular, I don't know which version of what I used; all I know is that I
installed WordPress and Gallery2 by a bunch of clicks into the DreamHost "one
click installation" web interface).
About every second WordPress theme from the "official" theme list is broken out
of the box, in one or several of the following ways:
* It has links pointing to nowhere
* It lists PHP errors in parts of the page
* It lists MySQL errors in parts of the page
I also tried a theme by "professional web designers". Wasn't broken out of the
box in the sense that once you "activated" the required plugins, it worked.
However, its way to complain about missing plugins was, of course, listing PHP
errors in parts of the page.
Gallery2 defaults to the image size of 640x480 (to see full resolution, you have
to click further). Fine with me, except that the bloody "themes" (together with
Firefox's menubars, toolbars and other such shitbars) /don't leave enough space/
to see the 640x480 images. And the hateful configuration web forms (with
different submit buttons for different parts of the settings, losing your
settings if you click the wrong button) of the dreaded themes don't seem to have
a way to configure the amount of pixels eaten by the useless parts of the layout.
After poking around for lots of time, my solution for WordPress was to take what
appeared to be the least disgusting theme with the most things already sort of
working and change the code to remove broken links and such. I think Gallery2 is
next; its PHP crud seems less comprehensible, but I see no choice.
What this seems to mean is, if you want to have a blog or a gallery, go to
Blogger or Picasa or any other free space to store similarly looking files, but
don't even think about actually paying for web hosting and rolling your own pile
of files. Especially if you're not really into PHP.
