I’ve been thinking recently about my projectGenie system, an particular about the configuration screens. There are quite a lot of options in there, too many perhaps, and although I’ve cleaned up the UI for version 0.7 quite a lot, it’s still complicated.
Then along comes Matt Mullenweg, who says “the less options the better”, and I can see why. His popular WordPress blogging software could be a configuration jungle, but he’s stripping out as many options as possible. That means that a) the users don’tget as confused and b) support calls are lessened because there is less to go wrong.
The downside is that for advanced users who want to tweak things to the nth degree, there isn’t the option available to do so straight away. However, WordPress offers the ability to create plugins, which can do whatever you want (almost). So, the best of both worlds. After all, ifyou’re a geek like me, what would you rather do: wade through dozens of ‘advanced configuration’ screens, or crack open a text editor and write your own plugin? I know what I’d choose.
So, in the spirit of Less Is More, I’m scrapping a lot of the options for projectGenie. No-one wants to be able to minutely modify three different date formats, or set the name for every page. That stuff should be left for the system to figure out. From now on I’ll be giving the very most for the very least. Or something.