The 2012 Xone: Coming Real Xoon!

[Gare]

Hi Joe—

There's not a lot to teach about using Xara with WordPress, other than how to scale your media for inserting into a WordPress template.

It's been said before, but just to recap: Xara Designer excels at writing static, exceptionally handsome, clever, short HTML documents. It is an HTML authoring tool, but...and here's the big "but"...it has no capability to serve as an HTML editor.

It can write very elegant pages that would take an eternity for an inexperienced person to code by hand. It was never designed to re-import its own HTML export, though, and for that reason, it's somewhat masochistic to try forcing a Xara exported HTML document into DreamWeaver, or WordPress' online editor.

It's not that Xara Designer is doing anything wrong, or it cannot be used to make websites; it just was not designed to write HTML that's easy for an HTML editor to edit.

NOTE: I am not in any way dumping on Xara here. Please read this 3x aloud. Xara does one thing exceptionally, and several other things outstandingly, and a few things conveniently, okay?

The be fair, it's unfair to compare WordPress to Xara, and to extend this idea, it's not realistic to expect WordPress and Xara to be totally code-compatible chums.

The decision we all agreed upon was a structured website that's extensible, seeing that no one can predict if holograms will be the standard for video in 3 months, you know? We wanted something that doesn't require an Einstein to upgrade, add new content, and maintain. So we're using a CMS, and it happens to be WordPress, because WordPress went from being a blogger's tool to a web developer's in several version over the past three years.

But this is all mechanical stuff under the hood. The January Xara Xone does feature new graphics and a new layout mostly because I'm not the artist Gary Priester is, but if you don't know what's driving the pages, all you'll see are some nice Xara illustrations. Cosmetically, for all intents and purposes, the new Xara Xone was designed in Xara.

It's just the plumbing on the other side of the screen we've tinkered with.

And we're having server problems today (the12th), so please stay tuned. We're paddling frantically below the water!

—Gary