Software Hammers and usability nails…

I was using a Plone based blogging tool called Quills which in my mind was absolutely the best thing on the planet for blogging until I realized that the way I was approaching my need was to take the biggest open source CMS out there and tweaking it further by adding Quills to it.

Not only was I blindsighted by the “coolness” of Plone and Quills but I also forgot about the goal that this peice of software was supposed to help achieve - provide an efficient mechanicsm to get started on blogging. Further, I made a bigger mistake - which was to look at Plone which is a sledge hammer when it comes to the different problems you can obliterate with it and used it to try and meet my goals.

After having moved over to WordPress I feel so much more comfortable with myself - when one chooses software applications to achieve a desired result one should look at the extent to which the peice of software addresses her needs and there should be no “and it also does this” or “it also has this feature” etc. and this certainly holds true for consumer applications where people are not thinking about “extensibility” of their software product out of the box.