Wordpress 2.5 Review
Apr 17th, 2008 by Karen
I’ve had some time to upgrade to Wordpress 2.5 and use it to work on my blog for a while. So I thought it was time to post a little bit about my thoughts on the new interface. Initially, I was a bit taken aback by the new interface. Things were moved around and called by different labels. But the reality is, although I’m a Wordpress veteran and knew that the Theme tab took one to where you could change your blog Design or that Options was where your blog Settings are, the new labels are much better more user-friendly and helpful for novices.
Also I’m had a chance to use the Media Library functionality and am quite please with how I can upload pictures to my blog. While most things I’d post on Flickr, I sometimes upload screenshots and the Media Library makes this very easy to do. I’m wondering how all this will work out once I have many screenshots in the library but only time will tell.
The WYSIWYG TinyMCE Editor is improved as well. I can easily Flash files without having to have a plugin. I was able to change my pages that had Flash in them to use this built in functionality very quickly with little muss.
I also like the AJAX interface although it gave me some issues at first because my Creative Commons license plugin was out of date. Probably the biggest adjustment for me has been the new comment moderation interface. I’ll be frank I don’t like it. While it is easy to batch moderate a single comment or a single page or comments, if there are many pages of spam comments, it is more of a pain to deal with them. Typically this isn’t an issue for my blog which gets 10-12 spam comments a day in moderation max. LITABlog though gets many, many more. I want to be able to mark every comment in moderation as spam easily. I can’t do this and it makes me grumpy.
All in all I’m really happy with the upgrade and look forward to finding more new features in the interface over time.
Some things are better, but the eensy-weensy fonts and the way Dashboard is tucked off in the corner are just bizarre.
Karen S,
I think they are trying to highlight the things people use the most often. But it seems like this is a reworking for inexperienced/non-users that potentially annoys more experienced users. Kevin Clarke commented on his blog that he didn’t like the fact that categories are so far down on the page and you have to scroll to add them. I’m not a fan of this either, but I guess it really all depends on how much you use categories.
How does playing “hide the dashboard” or putting the categories down the page help new/inexperienced users? I could do a heuristic about how this fails for new users in quite few ways. (Does a new user understand the term “media”?)
I think the opposite is true: WP is becoming more developer-centric.
Karen,
What useful purpose do you see the Dashboard serving? I’ve always thought of it as “for developers” because significant portions of its screen real estate highlight Wordpress news and developments. The only thing useful to me on the Dashboard is the incoming links and now that there is an RSS feed of these that I can subscribe to I don’t pay much attention to it in my Dashboard.
I agree the movement of categories to below the fold stinks. I find it more annoying every minute I use it. But the labels for things have changed in a non-developer direction. If I were learning the Wordpress database structure now I’d be confused by the disjoint between the labeling of tables/fields in the database and the user interface.
In terms of your question about the usability/understandability the term “media”, I have a couple of comments.
First, Wordpress hasn’t had a concerted photo, video, sound management and upload tool before. To do these kinds of things in Wordpress, you had to be relatively savvy and often install plugins. The addition of this functionality is a really good thing.
Second, I think this is one of those concepts which is hard to term. We are talking about a term which represents a group of things (photos, videos, audio) which are similar but very distinct. I’ve always found developing good labels for this type of thing hard. People are happy to group the items together but have a difficult time coming up with a label that “makes sense”. (I wouldn’t be surprised if you focus grouped people and they called this grouping - Stuff I Uploaded or something else action oriented) I think the different icons representing the different kinds of media are a good way to indicate to people what the label is referring to. In an ideal world this wouldn’t be necessary but sometimes it is because words don’t do a good job or representing or describing things.
BTW - I checked out two other blogging softwares to see what terms they use for “media”. Blogger separates out photos and videos. While it provides a tool for uploading it doesn’t seem to have a management console for the items once they are uploaded. Movable Type uses the term “asset” for photos, video, audio. Like Wordpress, it provides a way to manage these objects once they have been uploaded.
Have you looked at Absolute Comments? It appears to be well regarded.
I’m strongly disliking the new upload feature. Uploading pictures one by one pre 2.5 went quicker than using the multi-upload in 2.5 and then having to click a dozen times per picture to set all the fields correctly.
I wouldn’t call this release more developer centric as K.G mentions, to me it feels more like Windows Vista, focusing on eye candy instead of improving key features and stability.