rh3toric

I am going to refrain from saying that this update outright sucks, but I am not entirely happy. There are some great things added in and I have no issue with 2.5’s technical improvements (this list has a bunch).

This gripe is about the new UI. It seems evident that the designers involved have very little experience with WordPress and using WP as a CMS with their clients. Many of the elements in the admin area that make WP easier for my clients to use have been removed or fiddled with to the point where it is useless.

Now it is very possible that most people who use WP to blog and possibly have just a couple “pages” and do not usually build unique/custom template pages for special sections/content will probably see no issue with this update. If you use categories you probably will.

1. Header menu and content area (div.wrap) have different widths While the header menu retains the old style of flexing to the browser width the content area is defaulted to a max width style (984px). While this is minimal and the truth is most of my clients are on crappy Windows boxes with less the 1024px width, I actually have a bunch of clients where they are all on Macs or laptops with 1200px or better width screens.
2. What the hell is that dashboard link about? This placement is a major waste of space, there goes 30px of my screen I will never get back. OK, I may be nit picking on this one, but I think the new dashboard is more relevant than a landing page after you log in. Why isn’t it in another menu (I suggest the one on the left next to Settings is the best fit).
3. Removal of elements in sidebar to below entry area. This is a general gripe about the write post/page layout shuffle. With the old design I rarely had to scroll down to change many of the things that are now well below the post entry area (categories, comments, trackbacks, etc).
4. During the update I had two sites using WordPress in development. The clients had started entering content after a brief WP tutorial. Several days after the update, I started to hear grumbling. Even though the new Media Library and the image uploading options are awesome improvements, the new way to upload images is virtually invisible to all but the savvy. Hey I saw it and knew it was there, but my clients, they do not live and breath web stuff and they had no idea what the tiny icons and “Add media” were meant for.
5. Removal of “Save and Continue Editing”, yes I am well aware that WP will save things for you on the fly this is a lets make sure it was done thing. Many of the saving behaviors are odd as well. Clicking “Publish” should return you to a new post/page or Manage Posts/Pages. Clicking “Save” should be like the old “Save and Continue…”.
6. I am annoyed by the removal of the “Create a New Page” link in Manage Pages and always thought there should be one in Manage Posts as well. I am not sure how you work, but this creates a lot of extra clicking.
7. Post Timestamp - This change in nomenclature to “Publish Immediately” is confusing. The term “Publish Immediately” is a command not a question. Is this an option (the edit link suggests so) or a command (do I click on this).
8. Below many text fields there are helpful hints. This is great, but can we toggle their view, once you know what each field is for this is just annoying
9. Manage Pages - Call me old fashioned, but view, edit, and delete those words they mean something and that helps when you want to view edit or delete. The ability to click on the “Date” in the header above the list of pages and then hit Delete is just a bad idea. I do not know anyone who would want to delete all their pages in one move. Currently this page does not respect the Page Order values like the old one did (did I mention that is bad). One addition I have always wanted here was the ability to toggle the visibility of child pages.

Note: I started this post after I upgraded one site (so far, I have updated 5 more sites). I refrained from posting immediately to make sure I was not just writing a gut reaction. Asking my clients their thoughts on the changes, I received a lot of negative comments. Today 2.5.1 was released and I do hope there are some fixes in it for the UI. All said the new UI is not a colossal blunder, but it contains many shortsighted designer/developer centric elements that make it a move backwards in terms of WP’s usability. The one reason I use WordPress, is because of how easy it is to use and that I can hand off site management, for the most part, to a non-web person.

Updated my Mint install earlier this week, only to find it to break (and break a lot of things). I thought we had things working, but no. Besides reeking havoc with its own database, the Bird Feeder and its associated WP plugins (not created by Shaun Inman) have done some damage to the WordPress db and the feed.

With a bit of help from Blueprint here is a small redesign. Pity I was using version 0.3 and will need to upgrade soon. Hopefully that can be done as I test it out and tweak things.

Redesigning your own site is tough. This go around is close to a year in the planning (with only one week in making it happen). With many different sketches the final decision was between the design used and the one below.

Here we go: Annual CSS Naked Day.

Adobe developer Scott Byer points the finger at Apple as why Adobe will be late with CS3 (the Intel version). After talking about previous shortcut’s Adobe has used to switch Photoshop to PPC, etc. he comes straight to the punch with:

Doing that this time around was just not possible for a variety of reasons. It means is that this time, there’s no limited-cost option for getting most of the performance available on the platform for Photoshop in a short amount of time. In other words, no shortcuts.

Wait a sec, here is the spin:

That leaves doing the work for real - taking the whole application over into XCode and recompiling as a Universal Binary. And that’s no small task. You see, as software has matured so have the development environments we’ve used - Visual Studio and Metrowerks - they’ve adapted to handle the ever-growing applications using them. From having projects with large numbers of files that open quickly, to having compact debugging information, to having stable project formats that are text-merge-able in a source control system. These are things XCode is playing catch-up on. Now, Apple is doing an amazing job at catching up rapidly, but the truth is we don’t yet have a shipping XCode in hand that handles a large application well. And switching compilers always involves more work than you would think in a codebase of this size.

So, in short using low-cost shortcuts all these years has finally caught up. Why blame Apple for your lack of foresight?

Now I am in no way a software developer and may be putting my foot in my mouth, but all I can see in his post is a smoke screen.