I have created some views to replicate these pages with more filtering options. View Bulk Operations does come with a sample view for content, but I found that this view didn’t contain the options I wanted. Each view comes with two pages: one to replace the default admin pages (admin/content/node, admin/content/comment, and admin/user/user). It would be nice if these could be the same page but you can’t have more than one URL for a page. These are in use on The Webmaster Forums. Some of the terminology might need to be adjusted for your site, particularly the label for the taxonomy filter (forums are taxonomy terms). Views Bulk Operations is used to allow operations to be run on multiple items at once.

Warning: These views have a lot of complicated filters that may not be suitable for some users. You may want to restrict this to advanced users only (although I’m not sure there would be a situation where a user would have the administer nodes permission but wouldn’t be sophisticated enough to work with this interface!)

Below are screenshots of the three views (click to enlarge) with links to download the views.

I have been on maternity leave since October so I’m not entirely sure of the reasons for this decision. I know that some people went for training on the Open Text system in November and found it to be very cumbersome and difficult to use (something I thought was evident from the beginning, to be honest!). I think there were some other issues as well but I don’t know too much.

Needless to say, I am thrilled!  There is a tiny bit more information on the Kitchener Waterloo Drupal User’s Group, as well as in the UW Daily Bulletin.

I did do my best to sell the benefits of Drupal to the committee, and to explain why the OpenText product (formerly called RedDot) was not a good solution (phrasing it politely). However, I’m not sure that, given the chance, “we” would have chosen Drupal anyway. Why? Here’s a few of the biggest objections given by others in the group:

1. Sever models – the other two systems under consideration used a “push” model where static pages would be published to outlying web servers. This was considered to be preferable to a centralized model where pages are served by a database. Why? Mainly because many units within the university really want to run their own web servers. They also liked that the main system was “behind the firewall” and therefore more secure. This issue was focused on by some people to the exclusion of any other factors (usability? functionality? extensibility? who cares?). A few people actually said that since these two systems used the same publishing model then they were “really the same”.
2. “It’s not enterprise” - I’m not sure what this is actually supposed to mean but it was a big problem for some people (and I’ve heard this in other higher ed circles as well). Maybe if it had a sticker price of half a million dollars and  obscenely complicated server requirements, then it would be “enterprise”??
3. Security – there are still many people out there who believe that open source must be insecure because it’s developed by “some guy in his basement.”

There might have been other issues, had we ever gotten around to actually testing Drupal against the other two systems. Drupal isn’t exactly known for its usability, but from what I saw from the others Drupal isn’t any worse and might actually be better. To be honest, our presentation from Acquia didn’t do a lot to make the benefits of Drupal more clear.

However, as Zeldman notes:

No hammer fits all nails, and no solution, however elegant, will work for every situation. But if we’re open minded, Andy’s proposal may work in more situations than we at first suspect.

Remember NS4?

This technique is very similar to what we used to do for Netscape 4 users when use of that browser started to tail off. We would serve our CSS using @import, knowing that Netscape would ignore that command and either get no CSS at all or a simpler stylesheet served with <link>.The Universal stylesheet for IE6 is a slight variation on the same technique.

As in the NS4 days, if and when to go this route depends on the situation. Of course you’re not going to do something like that if 30% of your visitors are using that browser. But what if it’s 6%? Or 4%? You wouldn’t choose this approach if branding an image were an important part of your site, but if the content is the focus (as Andy suggests), then maybe this is an appropriate option to consider.

Is IE6 worse than NS4?

Does anyone remember how much agony we went through in the last days of Netscape 4?  I’m starting to think that IE6 is dragging along longer than Netscape 4 did, and is harder to get rid of. With Netscape 4 there seemed to be fewer stubborn and pervasive obstacles to upgrading.

They at least need to know

I strongly believe that users of older browsers, where possible, should at least be informed that they are using an outdated browser. This situation is never going to change if users don’t even know that there’s a problem (since, you know, Microsoft is doing such a great job of explaining that). Even if their only recourse is to go to their IT department and complain.

This, again, is a matter of appropriateness. Of course I’m not going to put a message on the UW home page telling IE6 users to upgrade. But on the web development site? That would be appropriate.

Until now the Mac has been my primary machine – home of email, web browsing, scheduling, and my main design activities. Why? Because that’s the way I set it up at first, before my laptop arrived. I used the laptop mainly for harder development activities, and file transfers (more on that later).

This week I finally decided to move to the Ubuntu machine for my primary activities. Why? Because I just don’t like OSX that much. It hinders my activities in some pretty significant ways.

Why I’m leaving Mac

1. Crap file management.The Finder doesn’t work for me. No location bar and no tree strucure side panel makes it difficult to navigate folders and move files around the way I want to.
2. Insufficient panels & customization. In Ubuntu I can have as many panels I want, can put all kinds of stuff on them, and can arrange them however I want. In OSX You just have the dock, and you can really only put applications or files on them, and you can’t even put in a separator to keep them organized.
3. Various other annoyances. Such as:
   • program menus are glued to the top of the screen on one monitor only, which detaches them from the window. This is especailly annoying when the program you’re using is on the second monitor.
   • the date/time doesn’t open to a navigable calendar. I often use this to check dates in the past or future.
   • you can’t see hidden files unless you run a command from the terminal to turn them on. Thus, hidden files are either always on or always off.

Why I’m keeping Mac

I’ll keep the Mac around for some tasks (I have a KVM switch set up so I can easily toggle between the two), including:

1. Those pesky .docx files. Correction: Open Office is now able to open .docx format. This must be new because when I tried last week it didn’t work.
2. Dreamweaver – until we get a CMS in place I still need to manage sites built with DW templates.
3. Photoshop – because sometimes the Gimp isn’t enough.

Update 02/09: My apologies for the tone of this post. I didn’t mean for it to be inflamatory in any way. I actually had made some edits that were accidentally lost (how, I don’t know!). Sorry about that!

Update 03/09: Comments on this post are now moderated.

(Unfortunately, most shared hosting accounts don’t have ssh access, but hopefully this will be useful for anyone on virtual hosts or dedicated servers who don’t already know how to do this!)

1. SSH into your website. Don’t know how? Try this:
   1. open a terminal
   2. type ssh username@yourwebsite.com
   3. agree to any host authenticity messages
   4. enter your password at the prompt
2. Navigate to your wp-content directory. Depending on your hosting setup the command will look something like this:cd httpdocs/wp-content/plugins/ or cd httpdocs/wp-content/themes/
3. Get the URL for the plugin or theme you want to download. The full url to the zip file. (This makes it really annoying when plugin developers hide the full url!)
4. Type in wget http://linkto.com/theplugin.zip
5. Wait for the plugin to download onto your server
6. Unzip the file by entering unzip theplugin.zip. If you have a .tar.gz file use tar -xvzf theplugin.tar.gz.

Done! Now you can go into your wordpress admin panel and activate the plugin or theme.

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.

We chose Drupal partly because our content site was already built on it so it’s a good opportunity for integration. We also have the programming expertise to make it work just the way we want to. With vBulletin we were often making do and putting in work-arounds to accomplish certain tasks. We also considered Vanilla and punBB – both open source, standards compliant, modular forum platforms.

The move didn’t go entirely smoothly. We decided to do it at Christmas time because we knew traffic would drop andway and if there were going to be problems, this would be the best time to sort them out. The biggest problem turned out to be the module that was generating the Google sitemaps, which brought the sever down a number of times before Liam figured out how to fix it. Unfortunately, our server admins are in the UK and weren’t availble to respond as quickly as we needed them to.

As with any change, we are experiencing a temporary drop in search rankings and visitor traffic. Members will awhile to get used to the new format, and surely some will choose not to come back. It will take some time to build the community back up again but in the end we feel the change will be well worth it.

If you’re not a member already, I hope you’ll stop by the forums and join us. We work hard to keep up a friendly, knowledgeable, spam free community.

(This actually happened just before Christmas but I wasn’t able to post because I’ve been sick for 2 weeks Expect a short flurry of posts as I catch up on things I’ve been thinking about).

Comments are now closed on this post. I was getting a lot of spam on it for some reason. If you would like to discuss this further, please visit the Webmaster Forums discussion on this topic.

I was inspired to come up with my list after looking at the font stacks on Joe Clark’s site. Check out his typography stylesheet for some interesting ideas.

I find myself using the list I from my A Padded Cell article all the time now. Just today I added a few more options as a back-up for a heading that’s already replaced by sIFR. From the way I have it’s easy to pick one font from each column, although I find Rutter’s chart to be a lot cleaner and better as a quick reference (and he’s got Adobe fonts included). I thought a lot about the best way to display that information, especially since I wanted to include information about which fonts are near equivalents of each other, as originated here.

In an upcoming update to A Padded Cell I’m using this font stack:

"Lucida Grande","Lucida Sans Unicode","Eras Medium ITC","Mg Open Moderna",Helvetica,Verdana,sans-serif

It’s working well so far but we need to do some more thorough testing before final release. I’ve also used that list to add some Linux alternatives to the font stack in various stylesheets I’ve come across at work.

If you’re finding my list to be useful I’d love to hear about it!

The Web has become essential to our everyday lives. We can’t let one company, Microsoft, control its innovation. This is a fight to protect the Web’s future.

I hope that as developers and Web users you will all show support for this cause. This is not Opera vs. Microsoft, but rather the continued innovation of the Web vs. Microsoft.

The complaint was filed with the European Comission and essentially requests that Microsoft

1. implement web standards properly
2. detach IE from the Windows operating system or provide other browsers by default

• Overview from OperaWatch
• Press release
• Open Letter from Håkon Wium Lie