I really don’t like the backend changes in WordPress 2.5. Really, really, really don’t like them. Most of the staff on PhoneNews.com doesn’t either… I’ve been getting an earful about it.
The WordPress team says that they hired an external research team, to determine how people use the backend. Problem is, they weighted experienced and non-experienced users equal, or so it seems. The backend of a WordPress site now reads, and functions, like a blog of its own.
The homepage looks like a blog about your blog. While that’s nice for someone new to online posting and reporting… it’s a dismal mess for the experienced user. I think it’s utter rubbish (I’ve been watching too much BBC, but nevertheless, it’s really bad).
Worse, there are functional limitations. I can no longer sort posts by author. Where did that functionality go? Now I can’t find out if a staffer is lagging in news articles without dredging through everyone else’s articles. Isn’t this what I got away from Joomla for?
TinyMCE 3 is nice, but it looks like they’ve ignored Internet Explorer in testing. I can’t even inject a URL with the visual editor on IE7. I can understand not liking IE, but in a pinch, I shouldn’t be expected to install Firefox or Safari. Hence this post is URL free (I’m writing it from an XP SP3 test system). Update: Most of these are graphical glitches, as I’ve done more testing, but they’re still present.
The good news is, backend modifications are at the top of the list for improvements in both WordPress 2.5.1 and 2.6. Version 2.5.1 will restore some functionality lost, while the focus on 2.6 is to overhaul the backend once again to balance between 2.3’s professional, and 2.5’s novice caterings.
All I can say to WordPress is, hurry.
I very strongly agree – and my blog is a one-man show, so I don’t even have to deal with others.
I don’t use the advanced editor (TinyMCE) at all, so I avoid those issues. (I’ve been doing HTML since 1991 – I can type it in myself faster. Using the editor slows me down.) What I do, however, is tweak quicktags.js, script-loader.php, and formatting.php in the WP code to add some extra buttons and functionality to the non-advanced editor, and to disable some of the so-called ‘helpful’ auto-formatting which breaks perfectly valid XHTML!
For example when I use the ‘Image’ button it not only asks me for the url, height, width, border, and alt text. Much faster. (IIRC, the default is just url, height & width.) I also dropped some formatting buttons I never used, and added some others. (I should do a post with my changes…)
I also use some plug-ins: http://www.gizmolovers.com/plugins/
The one I could not live without is ‘admin-menus’. I despise the click-hell that is the standard WP menus. Admin-menus saves my sanity.
But some things really need to be fixed. The new tags entry box trying to be ‘helpful’ and using AJAX to suggest tags to me. Firefox did it faster and better by remembering what I’ve typed in there in the past. AND it would suggest long tag strings to me, which was quite useful. The new ‘helper’ blocks FF from suggesting anything, and only allows me to enter one tag at a time if I want it’s suggestions – enter a comma and it is done. And the category selection used to be right in the upper-right, right next to the edit box. How they’ve shoved it down the screen – BELOW the tags! Hello, EVERY post has a category! Why did you move it from prime location and bury it? They let us drag and drop crap on other screens – how about letting us do the same with the authoring tool to setup the screen the way we want it?
Some of the changes to WP2.5 are good, and overall it is worth it, but some of the UI changes are so very annoying and I really feel slowed down using the admin interface now. It is more work to make a post than it used to be.