This morning I gave Structured Blogging a spin and decided to put it back on the shelf until it has matured a bit. The basic premise is fun: different layout and metadata for different kinds of posts, for example arts reviews. I occasionally review books and movies, so I thought I’d see what structured blogging could do for me.
At the moment Structured Blogging is only available as a WordPress plugin, which is perfect for me since that’s what I’m using. Installation was easy, and so was turning one of my past reviews into a structured
post.
However, some features didn’t work so well; for example, the script was unable to locate a screenshot URL for the book. The plugin includes some default styles, but those didn’t show up in my post, probably because I’ve tweaked my templates so much. This is not a big deal, all things considered, but I decided I didn’t want to bother with it right now. So I disabled the plugin.
At this point I discovered that the plugin doesn’t just add a couple of extra fields to the post database; it inserts extra code, including some Javascript, into the body of the post. Excuse me?! That stuff shouldn’t be hard-coded into my entry, not least because disabling the plugin should disable every trace of that plugin. If their formatting is hard-coded, it doesn’t disappear when the plugin does.
Oh, and they try to autoparagraph my posts, which just makes me mad. Don’t mess with my valid markup.
I like the idea of structured blogging, but I think the current implementation (which is several months old and rather alpha) is flawed. Too many things are hard-coded. I already talked about removing the plugin, but what if I want to add a different kind of post? I would have to modify the PHP code just for that. Instead, why not use XSLT and allow people to modify or add their own structures,
sort of like WordPress templates? Use WordPress custom fields for the extra data, and there you go.
I don’t know how feasible that is, at least without modifying the core WordPress files, but that’s my idea. One way or another, the plugin needs to be more flexible and especially not to bork anything when it’s disabled.