Customizing under the hood
I was talking with one of my clients who is a mechanic, and he was telling me about how he used to do a lot of car customization and performance enhancing, and that he really loved it.He told me that the problem with customizing cars is that when you start tinkering around under the hood, every little change presents new problems that need fixing, and soon, the project becomes unmanageable.
I’ve done my deal of modifying code (check out this custom XHTML osCommerce installation) and let me tell you: it doesn’t pay. My clients generally don’t care about how the site is tableless, CSS/XHTML valid, et cetera. They want to know that it works properly.
WordPress is beautiful and talks sweet to me.
WordPress is my dream in that regard: it’s beautifully coded out of the box so that creating templates is a logical, simple project. They make functions such as is_page() that allow you to simply ask “Is this the page I think it is?,” then continue to make progress. WordPress is my love. I will continue to be her bedfellow codefellow.
Both my mechanic client and I agreed: customizing is great fun, and very personally rewarding in the end. However, it’s a huge pain in the ass, and the rewards rarely (if ever) equal the effort.
