Thread

As one fortunate to be an EE hobbyist, I don’t need to worry about gaining-losing clients. That always focused my mind! So, I empathize with PXLated and, anyway, now is the time to push back, eh?

When I first heard rumors of the term ‘channel’, I judged it totally gimmicky and lame. Channels? Come on.

I have changed my mind over time and agree with the arguments made here - most especially on branding and support, both of which will be of major downstream benefit to EE users for securing clients (and, perhaps, entirely new types of clients), not just to Ellis Labs.

Refreshed branding - where justified - isn’t just a marketing exercise, but is integral to growing the community by 2X or 5X. This will be particularly true of EE2.0, given a transformed architecture and framework-ish ’ bent hitherto unknown and un-doable.

I believe ‘channels’ has just (barely) enough cohesive meaning/evocation (data streams, disparate media types, ‘feeds’ broadly understood) to be relevant and understandable to our visual-auditory cultural mindset, while - for that precise reason - enabling EllisLabs and the hardcore design/development community (cf PXLated) to co-define, um, the content (sorry) of ‘channels’ over the next few years as it becomes clear what can be done, uniquely, with CodeIgniter/EE2.X.

Point: it’s daring, a bit risky but quite collaborative with/for the community for EllisLabs to choose a term that is familiar but not over-loaded (yet) with boring, jargon from yesterday - as we all agree is the case with ‘weblogs’. I have used ‘section’ myself, but that is a tediously functional marker (merely) with well-rehearsed limitations semantically.

Now, granted, if channels is truly nasty, everyone is (will be) in trouble, but it’s hard to see how that could be the case?

As for involving the community - voting will provoke needless divisions, even if one assumed the requisite, shared expertise about such a delicate, yet vital matter for the product. The ‘had to do it or else’ flexibility accorded the term ‘weblogs’ arose from the unexpectedly emergent qualities of V1.X.

Institutionalizing optional labels for what is (as has been pointed out) the conceptual/feature ‘heart’ of the CMS going forward would be far riskier to the company (and the community) than the company choosing the term that (they are convinced) fits their design.

EllisLabs does have the obligation (qua profit-desiring enterprise) to do one hell of a job explaining what ‘channels’ in EE2.0 means as of now. Then, we can push it, pull it, massage it, explain it and - most fun of all - complain about it. If (a big ‘if’), EE2.0 grows past the useful meaning of the term ‘channel’, well, I suspect it will again become optional. That would be quite interesting and extraordinary in its own write and well worth the patient wait in the meanwhile. It would-will be a mark of grand success, not failure.

‘Channels’ is a tad weird, but brilliant ... probably like 2.X itself will be. Or at least we can hope 😉.

Even though I don’t like or agree, I do understand that you’ve spent a lot of time thinking about this. Since you have such an active, smart user forum, I just wish more opinions were sought earlier in the game 😊

Actually your opinions were sought very early in the game. Just because there wasn’t a poll doesn’t mean we haven’t been listening carefully and dialoguing with the forum community on this subject (as I remember though there were several polls on the subject, but not official ones). We’ve got over two years of notes surrounding potential “weblog” replacements, a good deal of which were drawn from feedback received here.

There was also a lengthy discussion back when Jambor-ee launched and a good deal of private feedback we’ve received through 1000s of sales emails over the years. edit: I don’t meant to imply that there have been 1000s of emails on the subject, just that in the large numbers of emails we receive, this tends to come up, they get sorted, responded to, and considered, much like the forums.

Ok, last two thoughts/expressions on this subject…

It’s data you store in a “container” A container can store anything (text, images, bits, pieces) and you draw from the container. We’ve always referred to weblogs as data containers in the past to get around the awkward naming anyway. Seemed to be the most common definition and most seemed to then understand (my observation anyway).

But, make it changeable and I don’t care what you call it 😊

I feel the need to say something, here. Change has always been followed with both positive and negative feedback. Change is always going to take some getting used to, no matter what term is used instead of Weblog. In my opinion, it’s best to let the dev team decide what to call it, and I think Channel is perfectly acceptable. It makes for great analogies to explain to clients and customers. And in my experience, I only have to explain once what the term means. My clients think more in terms of ‘entries’ anyway.

I don’t think putting it up to the popular vote would be a good thing. In politics, democracy is a good thing. In this case? Not so sure. Changing Weblog to Channel is going to be but one thing the community would like to have a say in, there are bound to be plenty more changes coming up that some will find illogical. Make this a dictatorship! I say this tongue-in-cheek, of course, but I do trust EllisLab to make informed decisions and I’m sure I’ll be able to work with EE2.0 just as well as I have, and am still, with EE1.6.x. The internal discussion on how things should be called or done in EE2.0 is one of the reasons it’s taking a long time to release it. The more people meddle with it, the longer it would take. And no one wants that!

In conclusion, Weblogs could be named anything and it would still be okay. It all depends on the story you build around it. They could even be called “Cows” in 2.0. I could work with that. Multiple “Cows” in one section of the site, you can “milk” a “cow” for content, restrict access to the “cow”, “milk” expires after a certain date, heck—even relationships would make more sense!

I couldn’t care less, it’s just a different combination of letters to type in between exp: and :entries.

I couldn’t care less, it’s just a different combination of letters to type in between exp: and :entries.

Don’t forget your opening and closing brackets now Steven!! 😉 { }.

I have to say that I am in two positions on this one. I don’t like the word channel as to me it conjures up the completely wrong image and so then you find yourself using analogies to explain a concept, something which I have never really liked doing as I don’t really like analogies all that much. I find that if I can’t get someone to understand something as it is and as it appears then making an analogy can actually be even more confusing. It’s akin to (here comes an analogy 😉 ) all those (teachers call them handy) mnemonic aids. The word itself might be easy to remember but can you remember what all the letters stand for?

Back in the 70s over here we had a series of adverts on television for the Green Cross Code, possibly something that you won’t have heard of in other countries. This was basically for teaching kids how to cross the road safely. When I learnt it it was easy. Stop, Look, Listen. Couldn’t get much easier really. The problem was they tried it out with Tom Baker (Doctor Who) and the word SPLINK. I only just about remembered the word itself today and almost had to look it up. If you were to ask me what the letters stood for though I couldn’t possibly tell you.

So that’s my one side of the coin. The other being that it’s not my software to judge and so I will just have to go with the majority on this. I am only one solitary developer so I will bow down to the development crew as they will no doubt have come across this many more times than I have.

I would still like to be able to change the word used if possible although I don’t think anyone here would like what I change it to 😉

I suppose given time we will see whether or not channel works or not. Change can be a good thing I suppose so I will try my best to work with it.

Just my two penneth worth though.

Just looking forward to the post on the 19th now though!! 😊

Best wishes,

Mark

From my experience, and mostly this is producing CMS sites for customers who are not particularly IT literate - channels seems to go down reasonable well. I have used it over other systems, custom systems, and especially this.
It does initially give people the wrong idea “do you mean TV?”... But a soon as you say something like all those suggestions above to explain it, people do feel it makes sense and quite like the word. Even to the degree you can have a conversation using that word without confusing it with something else.

When people use container, section, etc, etc. They do always seem to get fixed on this physical box on the website. I have never experienced this with Channels and like the selected terminology.

That being said - choice to change, or maintain an existing name for “weblogs” on older sites must be an option. Think how many support calls developers are going to get asking why “weblog” has changed, or where has it gone! I suggest making it changeable, but not as primary feature on the control panel. Make it so most people won’t change it, but developers can change it in the config if they wish - they will be handling the support themselves anyway!

Channels makes sense. Even though it’s associated with TV and
i don’t like TV to much (Rating-zealots, manipulators and twisting facts),
it probably gives a whole new opportunity for naming plugins and extensions..

i like Low’s approach: “Cows” ... “heck — even relationships would make more sense!” 😊

Don’t forget to see what wikipedia has to offer on Channels, once it’s official somebody can author in there, the official definition of channel for the EE web authoring system 😊
My favorites there at the wiki are:
Channel (communications), the route through which a message is sent. (applicable)
Channelling may also refer to:
  * Mediumship, through which disembodied spirits speak (not applicable, spooky but fun)
  * Channeling (Rolemaster), int the Rolemaster role-playing game

Cool so we can all be Rolemasters, I like that better than webmaster :coolhmm:

I only wish it were a slightly shorter word, but channel will be easy to spot when scanning code me thinks.

Please allow my honest contribution to this topic.
I’m currently not a user of Expression Engine, and english is not my first language.
To my point of view, channel is not related to TV directly. It’s a vector of transmission, a container, and as is sounds a good idea. My clients wouldn’t care about this word or another, more I think that weblogs or sections are too reducer. This could lead to a mis-understanding with pure site’s sections, ‘channel’ are not only that.
(Sorry for the mistakes)

I forgot to comment about the news of Simon Collison, Greg Wood, and Erskine design being on-board for bundling in the default site, this sounds like big-time news. There are many EE fans in the blogosphere that do stellar work, nice pick.
They’ve even wrapped up their part according to this post.

Please allow my honest contribution to this topic.
I’m currently not a user of Expression Engine, and english is not my first language.
To my point of view, channel is not related to TV directly. It’s a vector of transmission, a container, and as is sounds a good idea. My clients wouldn’t care about this word or another, more I think that weblogs or sections are too reducer. This could lead to a mis-understanding with pure site’s sections, ‘channel’ are not only that.
(Sorry for the mistakes)

Hi Nicolas,

Welcome to the forums! Don’t worry about English mistakes. I make plenty of them and its my first language.

I have no particular love of the word “channel” but just want to voice my support for the decision to change it and to make it unmodifiable. Like Derik said, changing it is such a big deal because it’s such a core component, which is why it shouldn’t be modifiable. There’s no perfect word—channel will require some explaining just like weblog did—but at least everyone will use the same term. I never changed weblog in the control panel because I couldn’t see the point when the word still needed to be weblog in the tags. To me creating a mismatch was a bigger deal than learning to live with the word weblog, and it’s painful to watch people try to talk about a thing they’re all using different words for because everyone could make up their own. (I realize section is the most popular, but still.)

And I really can’t wait to see the sample site. Will it also be the default template or what’s the deal on that?

And I really can’t wait to see the sample site. Will it also be the default template or what’s the deal on that?

The default template will be based on the Example Site. But the other option that we think will be much more popular with developers is the “blank” installation where EE is installed, but nothing else. In the majority of cases now a dev installs EE and then proceeds to delete everything relating to the default install or heavily modifying it. So an option in 2.0 will be to have EE installed but nothing else… no templates, no custom fields, weblogs (um, channels), etc… It should be a nice time saver.

That’s a good idea.