I know right?
Well you see, this was an article on WordPress vs Adobe Business Catalyst and, thanks to the input of some Adobe BC developers, it was found that there were many edits needed.
I am leaving the comments intact on this post so that those who took the time to send over their input will have their voice heard and I also will plan to publish more comments I have not gotten around to publishing yet (mainly because they’re so long and need some editing, and editing needs approval of their authors in and of themselves and well…I’m a busy girl).
Eventually, with the help of the information given to me by the Adobe BC developers who read this post, I plan to put up a revised version of the article. When? Well, not tomorrow, not next week, and probably not the week after. Since this is my blog, I’m my own boss, and the beauty of that is that I don’t have deadlines for things like this. I put my clients first and they take up A LOT of my time these days (it’s summer in Vancouver and I don’t even have a ‘driver’s tan’ on my left arm yet).
To those of you who have been monitoring this post, and to those who are disappointed that you couldn’t get your two cents published on my blog, I DO want you to read what I wrote to one commenter, who started this whole fiasco. I think it sheds light on a lot of the experience I’ve gone through in this, and also should help us learn how we should behave on the Internet when things like this come up. In short, just because someone disagrees with you, you don’t need to be their enemy.
Here goes:
In part I have some things to thank you for – you certainly did make me ‘famous’ there and I’ve been getting the most action on my blog in a very long time!
I wanted you to know that I have been in touch with some commenters on my blog post about correcting the information in my post. However, I never got anything from you directly, which sort of surprised me. If my article really made someone that angry, I wish they would have come to me in a way to let me know for educational purposes. If after a fair discussion they really still felt that I am a “WordPress snob” who is not willing to listen to anyone’s feedback, then of course, all the more right to post negative comments about me on the web.
But I am not really that kind of person, and I would say that everyone has been wrong at least once in their life before, but no one deserves to be ‘labelled’ permanently on the web because of this. Perhaps I made a mistake, I’m doing my best to find out where that mistake may have been. But everyone makes mistakes. If we treated people this poorly in person every time they made a mistake, our society would be really terrible to live in. I am happy to admit I am wrong, and will even retract my statements about Adobe BC, and if necessary, I’ll take down the article after confirming that it is so untrue, it is not even editable with community input.
However, calling me names and automatically making assumptions about my character, and even personalizing the issue, is what I feel was uncalled for. I don’t think people would speak that way about me in person, even if I was saying factually wrong things in front of them. They would likely handle my incorrectness (if any) in a much more polite and courteous way so as to try to help me understand better. So I am not sure why users on the Internet feel it’s ok to bully in cyberspace. We are also adults, and if we can’t be role models about this kind of thing to our next generation, the whole anti-bullying campaign will never end.
I would also argue that when Internet participants post these things about people instead of addressing the object or topic in question, it can affect them in ways you really don’t know the consequences of. We don’t know what people are going through personally outside of their work life, and we don’t know how individuals handle the way they are spoken of publicly. I happen to have a pretty strong backbone, and am not afraid of being wrong, but I know people that would not take this lightly and could inflict pain on themselves, whether mentally or physically, because of the way this was carried out. And surely we’ve all been at low points in our life where these types of personalized attacks would affect us internally more than we like to admit.
I did get some hater comments, which I was able to disregard easily, because I know that’s not an intelligent way of accomplishing any goal, whether to prove me wrong or to try to defend Adobe BC. I will not tolerate hater comments or anyone trying to attack me personally on my own blog, as I’m sure anyone wouldn’t. I am however, publishing comments that were respectful and constructive, and that showed me where I was wrong in a non-attacking way. I am open to discussion and learning.
I only recently got a few commenters who actually went into detail about Business Catalyst. I still believe that the PRINCIPLES I talked about hold true, and the entire article was written from the perspective that a developer would need to hand over the CMS in question to their client to be able to manage their own content later. That is where I saw problems happening, such as with the responsive code of the site, and with inline CSS and things like that, and I also mentioned a weakness where WordPress also has this same problem. I feel that if the client who is a non-coder has the ability to create new divs and content areas, then it will affect the breakpoint in the CSS. And the article did specifically say that a user can clean up their own code in a WYSIWYG editor but if they are a non-coder, they won’t know how anyway. So I did try to be careful about what I was saying, and many things are thus still true. I feel that many, many readers of my post judged the entire article by the headlines and titles only, not by actually reading the sentences.
As many have mentioned, Adobe does not do a good job of marketing their product, and when they do, they seem like they are trying to attract designers. So I was not able to find much info on it apart from what I could read, which was not very enticing as a developer or Internet marketer. Since the Adobe BC community seems so passionate about this product, I would challenge you all to step up and write more optimized content explaining it, so that it can be found easily by other online searchers.
Overall, I feel that the system we use to build our sites, and whether or not someone is misinformed about one system or another, none of that is so important in the whole scheme of life’s purpose to create an argument over this, or to stir up an army to attack an individual about it. It’s just not worth it. I was travelling in a part of the world recently where it was not ok for me to be in that country at first, being born of my parents, because my parents were born in a certain other country (though I am Canadian-born). People there go to war over religion and birth origin. People die because of arguments over beliefs and it all stems from the thought that we think it’s ok to be violent, either with words or actions, because someone has a different opinion than us – whether or not that person is factually right or wrong. We are so privileged in North America, we think that our biggest problem is what someone has to say about our preferred method of developing a web site. It is not worth fighting over at all. There are many, many bigger battles to pick.
I would challenge you with this, that the next time you get angry over someone saying something wrong or bad about Adobe BC, you use that energy to do something positive for a charity with your technical and web site work, and use Adobe BC to do it! There are a lot of charities that just don’t have the resources to hire someone to help them get off of really old systems, and it would be great if someone with your technical know-how could spend time on that, rather than on the Web trying to vent anger at a “WordPress snob.”
Note: The person who originally called me a “WordPress snob” eventually apologized, so I thank him for that.
I think it’s time this issue is put to rest, so I am closing the comment form down and will try to get around to publishing the comments some of you have left me already. But slowly, bit by bit, after I’m done with my client work, get some sleep, and can come up for some air.