Before switching to Elements (which I love!) I used WordPress for blogging and RW Classic for my other website. Rebuilding my Classic website in Elements and publish it was no problem. But blogging with the Elements CMS is very, very frustrating. My problems with the CMS are:
Publishing problems. I can’t get my blogging site uploaded to my hosting provider. Daniel looked into the logs and my provider is now investigating the problems.
Multiple tags or categories attached to a post will render as “Array” and not as a list of tags or categories.
Filtering by tags is possible, but why not by categories? That is common in blogging.
No possibility (yet?) for quickly switching to “Previous” or “Next” posts.
The “Related items” component shows related posts (I think, but I haven’t checked it yet), but clicking on such a related post in browser preview results in “Page not found”.
My biggest issue, though, is blank lines between paragraphs. I know that rendering line breaks and blank lines is a MarkDown issue. Some engines accept double spaces, others HTML or a backslash, etc. Which is already ridiculous, I think: why is there no standardization?
But what about Elements? Using the Maximilian project for my blogging Elements renders the blank lines that I want. Using the Ascent project for my blogging Elements renders no blank lines but only a line break. I tried every MarkDown possibility but I don’t see any consistency in the way that Elements handles this. And I’m tired of trying and trying.
Blank lines are very commonly used in blogging to keep posts readable. So please, give us a good Elements solution for this in the CMS. Blogging is supposed to be fun. But for me it is so frustrating by now that I’m thinking of turning back to WordPress.
I had hoped that the v2.0 would have fixed some of these things (particularly the ‘Related Items’ showing ‘Page not found’ when clicked) but sadly not. I’d also love to see a ‘Previous’/‘Next’ facility and categories.
I’m not sure what your publishing problems are about. What I think everyone is (re)finding out is that every hosting service has different tech stacks and manages them differently, and navigating that can be a nightmare.
Yes, tags are basically an array in the current CMS. You’d have to create code to look for each of them and show them separately, something I’m hoping the next iteration of the CMS will do.
Good question. Seems like it would be easy enough for @ben to add that to the Filter choices, but I suspect it’s another of those “stretched a bit too thin” problems on the Realmac side. We need a better system of making change/addition requests. We also need more visibility to how Realmac is prioritizing these. Realmac set up something early on to do that, but its no longer referred to and seems to be orphaned.
Ditto. This is something that should be on the CMS change/addition list.
You haven’t hooked something up correctly, then. Because it works for me and others.
Blank lines: this is actually a CSS issue, not a Markdown one. Maximillian and Ascent are applying different CSS to Markdown. The inconsistency isn’t Realmac’s or Markdown’s. I suppose you could add an Advanced > CSS Classes to deal with this, but the proper way is probably to do that in the Theme, for which we still don’t quite have all the tools necessary. However, using Realmac’s built-in CSS is consistent.
Fun blogging: I’d never call WordPress fun. It’s a different kind of pain longterm. Moreover, I believe WordPress has led to a lot of cookie-cutter blogging, almost treating it as a private social media network. I had this argument (and still have it) with Dave Winer, one of the other original bloggers when we started, that the aspiration should be something higher than just spouting opinions out loud.
I tried hard early on to get @dan and Realmac to do more on the blogging side. I got initial resistance. But we eventually got the CMS as the voices started piling on to mine. I believe that Realmac still has a lot to do to support blogging, and frankly, not doing that work will limit Elements usefulness to the largest group of possible purchasers. So I continue to lobby for more on the blogging/CMS side.
Thanks for your long careful answer. I’m glad to know that someone dived in so deep to answer my questions. As for my publishing problems: there is probably a connection with the php-version on my hosting service. They use version 8.3 and when I tried to open a published blog post I got this message: Composer detected issues in your platform: Your Composer dependencies require a PHP version ">= 8.4. I hope my hosting provider will solve this on Monday.
I’m not a developer. I’m an amateur with a better knowledge on some technical issues than the average one, I suppose. But comparing the CSS that Maximillian and Ascent use is far beyond my possibilities. I’m glad, though, that I mentioned both in my article. I know now that with my limited knowledge I’ll not be able to get a blog in the Ascent project working. I want to be a blogger, not be a blog developer thinking about CSS and Markdown issues. I’ll switch to Maximillian because that project seems to work fine, although I prefer the Ascent design. Related items work fine in Maximillian too.
I agree with you that WordPress blogging is not uncomplicated fun either. But I never had all the frustration that I have now. I won’t switch back to WordPress immediately, but first switch to Maximillian with Elements. It is good to know that there is a lobbyist (or maybe more?) for putting more time and work in the CMS.
I just found out (in Ascent) that links in an md-file don’t render as visible links in preview. The new MarkDown component (in Ascent) however, does indeed render visible links. Strange, isn’t it? In Maximillian links in md-files are really visible as links in browser preview. Probably a CSS issue again, but al of this underlines that there is a lot of work to do before the CMS works smoothly for blogging. So @ben, take up the gauntlet of making Elements CMS a real blogging platform.
Link styling in Markdown, either the component or CMS is controlled by the Typography in the Theme. Here is what the Architect Theme has, look at the bottom for the Link Style. Nothing is set.
You can either override the Theme Typography, article, and set these up the way you want to or create a custom Typography that you can use for styling Markdown. Here is the one I set up.
Thanks Edward for reminding me of Typography in the Theme Studio. Again, I must add, because you told me about the styling possibilities of Typography once before. That was when I was complaining about styling quotes. Sorry that I so easily forget your tips. I suppose it’s because after several weeks trying, puzzling and changing the website I was too frustrated to remember. I will stick with my decision to switch to the Maximillian project in stead of Ascent. Thanks again.
The problem is very likely how things are hooked up when ‘Related Items’ doesn’t work. The problem is that there is no documentation on how to do this. And if it fails in the preview it doesn’t give you much confidence it will work on a web server. Interestingly the URL that fails is exactly the same one which works when clicking on the blog entry directly.
