I was a bit confused if the WordPress dev blog was playing an April Fool’s joke with their announcement of “Wordpattern”. Having read it over, I’m fairly convinced it’s a joke, but should note that I can tend to be unfortunately gullible, at times. In any case, here are some items of humor I came across while researching this “hoax(?)”.
Our groundbreaking, no-nonsense approach of creating a fast and lean CMSMS (CMS management system) is unparalleled and will fulfill the need of every user out there – we won’t be content with anything less.
A “Content Management Software Management System”? Awesome.
The Wordpattern features page has some choice tidbits:
4 Minute Install
The latest InstallMark™ benchmarks clock the WordPattern install process in at 3:47 – that’s a 25% improvement over WordPress 2.0, and a whopping 41% faster than Textpattern.
Gidgets
Like widgets, only cuter.
I think this marks the first time a web application benchmarked its install speed. I also like BJAX, Web2.1 (beta), and invisible URLs. The roadmap section is not to be missed, detailing Wordpattern’s “5 milestones” (the 5th being World Domination). I like the idea of “Tiger Teams”, as well as the Marketing and Evangelism Team. Also linked from the roadmap is Huhcorp, who they’re evidently working with. Their page is hilarious as well.
Our name will confuse you, but, you have to admit, the logo design is pretty cool. And we’re good at turning regular words into “e-words,” such as “e-consulting,” “e-business” or “e-sexual harassment.”
Our office is really modern and we’ve got nice computers and stuff. If you ever saw it, you’d say “Wow, cool office. These guys are legit.”
Following more links, to Huhcorp’s “ideas” page:
Our female staff members are all hot, so, even if there’s nothing to meet about, we’ll sit and flirt with them, and charge you for the time. When one of our new-age marketing gurus or design experts or consultants has an idea, the rest of us look at him or her with serious expressions and write stuff down on paper.
I’m really temped to quote their entire site, because I find it all completely awesome, but you should just go and check it out for yourself. The coup de grace of this Wordpattern Masquerade is on the legal page, where one finds the following:
The Fine Print
All content, code, images, sounds, smells, ambience and the warm fuzzy feeling you get while basking in our glow are Copyright (Q) 1972-1976 The WordPattern Concern. WordPattern™, the WordPattern Logo™, the letters W™ and P™, the colours white™ and black™, and the non-breaking space™ are registered trademarks. The WordPattern Concern does not represent the accuracy or reliability of the information on these so-called “web pages”, after all you can’t believe anything you read on the internets these days.
Things like this make April Fool’s Day worthwhile. But on a more serious bent, why don’t companies make their “serious” web pages this interesting? Would I want to use a company like Huh? for marketing by looking at their website? Maybe, and maybe not, but they would certainly stand out from the crowd, and that’s never a bad thing. Offering serious and quality information about your product is a good thing, certainly, but it can be oh so dull. I would love to see companies manage to fit factual aspects into entertaining text. I mean, when was the last time you READ through the entirety of a corporation’s site because it was entertaining? Yeah, me neither. If we’re going to start talking about aspects of Web 2.1 (beta), I think a defining feature should be humor.
** Mention of “Wordpattern” dates back awhile, at least to January 2005. It appears the original coinage of “Wordpattern” (and Textpress) belong to Jina Bolton, though her post is lost to everything but Google’s cached pages. Her post was in response to this post on Joshuaink. Here’s Google’s cached version (2nd post down) if you’d like to read it. There, I’ve done my snooping for the day.