First, don’t think for a minute that I am complaining. I am quite overwhelmed with appreciation for all the contributions people make to the open source initiatives. I read a comment on a blog from a gentleman who puts his plug-in’s (and they are high quality) out for free because he doesn’t believe people should have to continue to re-invent the wheel every time. Renews your faith in human kindness and the potential for communities to come together and accomplish something bigger than any one individual just looking out for themselves can accomplish. Don’t worry, I’m not tearing up. 
Image via Wikipedia
I’m not sure what others have found when firing up WordPress for the first time on a hosting site so they can utilize the treasure trove of Plug-In’s, but the learning curve feels at times like Mt. Everest!!! Like learning the streets in North Carolina where you can’t see through the trees and there is no coast or mountains to orient to, you have to do a fair amount of memorizing if you are not planning to dive immediately into PHP – although with shortcodes I know that I am not too far from directly editing some code and even some CSS. Next thing you know I’ll have delusions of creating my own theme!
There are those four types of knowing:
1. Not knowing what you don’t know
2. Knowing what you know
3. Knowing what you don’t know
4. Not knowing what you know
I feel like I am moving gradually from 1 closer to 2, at least at this first phase of getting some stuff thrown together to see what works and what doesn’t. But I have this nagging suspicion that there are a number of initial things I should be putting in place to get greater efficiencies later. Each thing added seems like a growing exponential set of things (with attributes) I will need to go back and edit later once I better appreciate the implications.
And now back to work the claim!
Image by slideshow bob via Flickr
