The Best: Fullscreen writing mode*
So simple, so powerful, and hidden in plain sight:
Overall the new editing interface is much better and less likely to mangle your post.
The Worst: Image uploading
They came so close to nailing this. For example, it’s great that you can now upload multiple files at one time, but the bad stuff totally outweighs this.
- The upload interface takes forever to load. Yeah, I’m on a cheap shared host, but the 2.3 image uploader was plenty fast, and you know, everybody is on a cheap shared host. Also, what’s with that animated gif showing up in inconsistent places? As a designer I know the convoluted CSS reason it’s doing that, but a normal person looks at that as a big WTF and worries about it.
- There are too many steps. I have to upload an image, enter in any meta info associated with it, then save it. I can’t directly insert the image into the post from here. Instead I have to go to the Gallery, “show” the image, remove the link around the image, check “full size” instead of “thumbnail”, then finally “insert into post” (while carefully avoiding clicking “Delete”).
- Subtle and geeky, but they totally botched the data entry and HTML for image ALT and TITLE attributes. See my Twitter entry for why this matters.
Gripes aside, I love and recommend Wordpress 2.5. My impression is that the uploading is a huge change in this release, they didn’t quite nail it, but they let it go out as good enough. It will probably be fixed soon, and if it isn’t the magic of the open source plugin community will fix it for us.
No matter what, don’t hold off on upgrading just because image uploading isn’t polished.
Cautionary Tale: This week I took on an emergency client. Their Wordpress was seriously outdated and they got PWNED by script kiddies. Good thing the attacker was just trying to spam (instead of pulling an rm -rf /) so I was able to recover everything for my new client and upgrade/harden their Wordpress installation.
Successful disaster recovery is lovely and all, but it’s much better to have security and regular backups. Always backup your hard drive, keep your Wordpress updated, use secure passwords, use this WP backup plugin to auto backup your WP database, and failing that, hire me before disaster strikes. My midnight emergency rates are horrendous ;-)
* If you want distraction free writing on your desktop try Writeroom [mac] or Darkroom [windows].
2 Comments ↓
You forgot to mention the new admin section for sidebar widgets. It’s great for people with only one sidebar, but for those of us with multiple sidebars, it’s one of the worst ideas introduced into WP 2.5.
Yeah the Widget admin screen is atrocious. Wordpress had Happy Cog do the 2.5 redesign, but some pieces of WP now feel like they were designed by someone who doesn’t use WP on a daily basis.
How would someone contribute graphic design skills to WP? Open source projects know how to deal with code contributions, but not so much for UI design.