Following a thread through some blog posts this morning – I started at The Reverend’s post about Martha’s documentation of her hacking on WPMU, including a description of a WordPress plugin I hadn’t heard of before – Flutter.
Damn. The Rev’s gonna love this.
One of the things I LOVE about Drupal is the fantastic CCK plugin that lets me create compound structured content types without hacking the database or writing code. Things like Events. Profiles. Pretty much anything that can be stored as database records.
Flutter appears to do most of what I use CCK for. It’s a bit of a hack on top of WordPress’s custom fields design, but whatever. I really don’t care how it works under the hood. It works. And it’s really nice. You can create any number of custom content types, groups that can contain any number of fields – and the fields can be simple text strings, long text chunks, images, audio, dates… Very cool.
So far, the only thing I’ve found really missing from what I use in CCK is the idea of linking nodes (or posts or pages – I haven’t seen a way to select a page or post as a field in another – but that’s not fatal – tags and categories can make up for some of that).
I’ll be playing with Flutter over the next few weeks. I think this might go a LONG way to implementing some of the things I’ve been thinking about wrt WordPress as a course blogging and publishing platform – WITHOUT HAVING TO WRITE CODE.
I love that. Thanks to Martha and Jim for the heads up on Flutter!
Update: doh. Looks like Flutter does some unpleasant things to the main Write Post interface as well – it was wrapping this post to a set width, making it look ickyier than usual. hrm…
yeah. definitely not quite ready for prime time. but still, something worth keeping a close eye on. this could really make some interesting things possible with wordpress…
Update 2: the evil russian spammers seem to REALLY like this post, so I’ve closed comments. Sorry. stupid russian spammers…