Follow-up on a piece I wrote yesterday about adding storage to WordPress. Thanks to all the people who helped answer the question, readers of this blog, friends from the Drummer and FeedLand communities, even devs who work at Automattic. 😄#
I said in the piece: "It has happened before that I’ve asked for a feature in a product that was already there." #
WordPress has the ability to add the equivalent of Mac refcons to WordPress posts. But, and this is an important caveat, you can only create such an object in PHP running on the server that's hosting the website. Once it's created you can access and update the stored object via their API. #
Now I haven't tried it myself, because I don't have my own WordPress installation and I assume I can't install software on wordpress.com. And even if I could, it's not the feature I imagined. Tantalizingly close, but not able to do what I want. #
I want to create an editor for WordPress posts that's perfect for me. That means I edit the post in my outliner. I can attach attributes to headlines, like an image attribute with a small graphic that's displayed in the right margin. Or I can enclose text in double-square brackets and have it be indexed by and linked to my tag manager, like this: Drummer. Or I can use my glossary to fill in links and data that I want standardize on. I've developed a set of tools I've been using in some cases for over 30 years. I want to use them in WordPress. But more importantly, I want WordPress to become a writing platform for everyone, I think it can do a lot of important things that it doesn't do, and it's being held back by this missing feature. That's how I look at it, and I realize that's a different perspective from that of developers who work inside Automattic who have to keep their servers running.#
And btw, I can do much of that without this feature. But with it, I can edit any post even if I don't have the application I wrote it with handy, or the source code for the post I want to change. This is part of the philosophy of having only one structure for my blog writing, to make it easy to make changes. If I have two structures, one for editing and one for reading all of a sudden making a change takes a dozen or more steps, where if the data lives in the same place as the rendered content, it can be edited with one click. This breakthrough, and it was definitely a breakthrough in the development of blogging, in 1999, was in a post entitled Edit This Page. #
Anyway I assume the current design makes sure only people who have access to the server can do this. Or maybe it's just an oversight? I hope it's the latter, and I hope we can have the feature in the API in time to make a difference. #
I've opened a thread on the Scripting News repo to follow up on this very interesting discussion. #
Last update: Thursday September 28, 2023; 8:41 PM EDT.
You know those obnoxious sites that pop up dialogs when they think you're about to leave, asking you to subscribe to their email newsletter? Well that won't do for Scripting News readers who are a discerning lot, very loyal, but that wouldn't last long if I did rude stuff like that. So here I am at the bottom of the page quietly encouraging you to sign up for the nightly email. It's got everything from the previous day on Scripting, plus the contents of the linkblog and who knows what else we'll get in there. People really love it. I wish I had done it sooner. And every email has an unsub link so if you want to get out, you can, easily -- no questions asked, and no follow-ups. Go ahead and do it, you won't be sorry! :-)