Megan Jack.com: Web Design and that

The much celebrated Wordpress 2.5 upgrade was released about a month and a half ago and I’ve finally gotten around to upgrading my installation. I was really looking forward to the new Happy Cog designed admin interface. But guess what? I was disappointed.

The new design is surely nicer looking than the old (although I didn’t really have a problem with the old design). They’ve made quite a few interface changes – some good, some not so good. Read on to see some screenshots and analysis of the new interface.

I must preface this by saying that I haven’t had a chance to read much about the new design - there may be some rationale for a lot of these changes that I don’t know about. I also don’t participate at the Wordpress forums. Of the old Wordpress admin panel, Happy cog says:

“There was a randomness and unpredictability to everything from the location of key functions to the number of items in the navigation menu.”

I don’t feel that the new interface is much of an improvement in this regard. In fact, I find some elements to be even more random and unpredictable than before. I gather that they were trying to keep the peripheral tasks out of the way, but what they’ve ended up doing is mixing different types of tasks and moving some things too far from where you need them.

Note: Screenshots of the old Wordpress interface are available here (those are from a slightly older version but you’ll get the gist). In this post all screenshots link to the full versions.

The header

This is the new Wordpress header:

Notice how they’ve split up the navigation links into 2 main places with some secondary links at the very top (They all used to be in one long list). My biggest problem with this is that the design link is in with the content editing links and not with the administration. As we’ll see below, the designers seem to think that Wordpress users change their themes a lot. I don’t.

The dashboard link has also been moved way up to the top corner where you can barely even see it. The dashboard is an important page, the link to it should be more prominent.

The dashboard

The new dashboard layout is one of the most celebrated changes in Wordpress 2.5. The old dashboard had a brief welcome bit with some quick links to common tasks and a sidebar with links to your latest incoming links, comments and posts. The bulk of the page was made up of recent news from the Wordpress development blog. Not the greatest use of space.

The new dashboard has improved the information provided but I still think it could be better. Take the top section under the orange header:

One of my big annoyances with this page is the way they’ve done the incoming links box:

Almost everything about this is wrong:

• The list does not include the title of the post being linked.
• The link is on the word “saying”, not the post tile. We know now to avoid “click here” links, right? This is the same thing.
• The quoted text is the opening line of the post, not the reference to your post.

You can edit this box but that only allows you to change the number of items shown and the post date (which was not displayed by default, if I remember correctly). For me the option to show the date doesn’t actually work.

The incoming links box should:

• display the title of the linking post.
• display the date of the linking post.
• display the author/site title of the linking post.
• if possible, display the context of the link to your site.
• link the title to the referrring page.
• provide options to let you turn all of these elements on or off.

(And, yes, my backlinks are really pathetic!)

The post composer & editor

This is where you go to write new posts. In the new interface they’ve moved a lot of the options to the space below the post editor, instead of keeping them in the sidebar. The only thing they kept in the sidebar is the preview and save/publish links, plus a list of related links.

There are a couple of reasons why this is really annoying:

• When I finish writing a post, my eye is at the bottom of the post text box. Now I want to either preview my post or publish it. But where are the buttons to do that? Not right underneath the post box where they should be, they’re over in the sidebar near the top of the page.
• When i start writing a post I want to make sure I remember to enter the tags and categories. In the old interface this was next to the post box where I could see it from the start. Now I have to remember to scroll down below the bottom of the post box and fill in those options.
• Meanwhile, the permalink edit option is right at the top, under the title of the post. How does that make sense? (Not shown in screenshot - this only shows up after a post has been saved once)
• The new arrangement of the page, along with the larger size of headings and bigger margins means that this is a much longer page than it used to be. There’s a lot of unnecessary scrolling.
• The related links bit is really unnecessary because those pages are easily accessible through the header menus

The image uploader

One of the things they’ve added here is a media library feature that can be accessed through the write interface. It seems they think that Wordpress users like to add a lot of audio and video and stuff. I don’t. Image uploading is enough for me.

The other problem with this tool is that it doesn’t actually work. I found out later that it uses flash, which is a bit of an issue in Opera/Linux. (Flash does work in Opera/Linux, it just doesn’t work well). I was fiddling around with my permissions trying to figure out why this didn’t work but it turns out that all sorts of other things could be going wrong. I didn’t get any error messages either.

I’m also not a huge fan of the lightbox effect. I guess some people think this is cool but for me it’s kind of lame and annoying.

Other new features

I am happy that the new visual editor works in Opera. I can write HTML just fine but when I’m writing I prefer to concentrate on writing and looking at mark-up gets in the way.

Tagging is fully integrated in the 2.5 which is nice to have. You used to have to install a plugin for that. However, I must wonder if it’s really necessary to include these things in core when they can be easily managed by plugins.

It is really awesome to have notification of updates to plugins and an easy way to install them quickly. Although now I know how to use wget and I’d rather do it that way…

Final thoughts

I guess this release was designed with a certain type of blogger in mind. Someone who uses a lot of multimedia and changes themes a lot. That’s not me. I’m not a super hard core wordpress user like some people. I like the platform but I don’t really have time to spend much time playing with it and participating in the community. I guess it’s time for me to delve into creating a custom CSS and checking out some of the plugins available for the admin panel.

Edit: I just came in to fix some type-os and once again attempted to scroll to the bottom to find the save button! This is going to take some getting used to.

Filed under Design, Open Source, Software, Usability.