Anyway, tomorrow I can check out the Zone on my auxiliary XP machine and see if that just might be why some features aren’t snapping in like they’re supposed to.

Nabob? Of course I’m going to resist change. Hello? Conservative?

Haven’t a clue what you mean by lack of indentation. I’m seeing trees develop. You’ve participated in trees down the page.

The crucial thing you may have missed about hierarchiesof boards is the automatic upward aggregation of posts. You won’t miss anything if you read a parent forum–it’ll contain all of the posts from the children. OTOH, the concept gives you the freedom to drill down into the hiearchy to narrowly focus on a particular topic stream.

Certainly I know that WordPress is a blogging engine, Tom. But I have to disagree when you go on to assert that it’s not a forum engine. It most certainly is. It’s both, because forums and blogs are the same thing via a topological transformation. They’re instances of what in the abstract I call “conversational messaging”: Posts and replies, always forming tree-shaped graphs, even if a particular display software chooses not to display the tree.

I’m actually not the first person to remake WordPress as a forum, but I think I’m the first person to abstract it into a conversational messaging engine. What’s unique to my hack is a TOC engine that’s the concrete manifestation of the assertion that blogs and forums are topologicaly the same: It produces both, and many variations in-between. One set of settings produces the flat listing of topics with the reply tree depending from it, stereotypically the visual organization of a forum. But a different set of settings, operating on the same stream of messages produces a newspaper-style layout characteristic of many blog front pages.

Wanna see it in action? I haven’t yet gotten around to mention that WordPress automatically produces author compilations, so in effect we all have a personal blog at the HabitableZone. The URL is habitablezone.com/author/username.

I’ve set up author pages to display blog style. Here’s yours. It’s not yet interesting, having only a couple of posts. But check out Eri’s. She’s been busy, and her personal blog shows off a stream of messages organized in a more bloglike way.

A final thing to be said in favor of WordPress is that it’s well-built and relatively lean-and-mean for open-source software. They had the wisdom to anticipate that people like me would be compelled to hack it to our own purposes–that’s what open source is all about, after all–and so they made it, at heart, a rich erector set for constructing variations on the conversational messaging theme; they don’t fight customization, they facilitate it.

The opposite of everything in that last paragraph was true of TikiWiki. They even had the hubris to eschew software plugins on the theory that they knew best what was “best of breed” in every category. You wanna talk about centrally-planned and managed, that was DamnTikiWiki.

Don’t be such a nattering nabob, Tom. How could this not be lightyears better than DamnTikiWiki?