Wordpress 2.5 Demo and Thoughts
Browsing at 9rules, I came across a member site linking over to a demo of the alpha version of Wordpress 2.5. As a Wordpress junkie, I had to give it a try, and thus far, I am liking what I am seeing. The admin panel looks a whole lot cleaner than the currently cluttered version of Wordpress. What helps this de-cluttering is the effective use of the main navigation.
In it’s current state, all of the options in the main nav is overkill. I would assume that on a typical login, the items such as User management, Plugins, and Settings aren’t needed since those things aren’t touched very often. Version 2.5 creates this separation by making the main navigation only the elements that are more relevant on a typical login: Write, Manage, Design, and Comments. I’m don’t 100% agree on Design needing to be there in that main navigation though. And I love the comments icon that shows the count of comments. Very nice touch.
Another major improvement is the dashboard. Right now, the dashboard is pretty much crap with a whole lot of irrelevant information. I personally don’t like seeing feeds from the Wordpress blog, or other Wordpress sites. What I DO like seeing is information relevant to my blog, which 2.5 has done. The Wordpress blogs feeds are still there, but closer to the bottom of the page and not as dominant on the page as they currently are.
The post pages are quite cleaner too, moving all of the right hand items down below the text area post for the content. Though it makes for much more scrolling, I don’t see it as a huge issue and it doesn’t make my eyes wander all over the page.
There are many more changes, however those were the couple that stood out initially. Since it’s still in alpha, I would imagine there will be many more changes, but as it is now, it is still quite an upgrade from the current state of the dashboard. I very much look forward to this new release though, which looks to be in just under a month. Is Happy Cog still on this redesign?
What do you think of the changes in the demo?
5 Comments
I’m on the fence. Some of it I like - UI does look more polished, more ‘proffesional CMS’ than ‘manage a blog’ which is good. But there are some odd link placement’s I’m not too keen on, and so far writing a post doesn’t feel as intuitive as it did previously, but perhaps I just need to let it grow on me. There are also some pretty serious javascript kinks to be ironed out - Safari 3 Mac crashed when switching between the wysiwyg and html editor, for example. Will be interesting to see if Happycog offer a write-up on their involvement.
Incidentally, there’s a discussion happening over here with some interesting opinions so far.
Yeah that discussion is pretty interesting. Funny that a couple of the comments say it looks too “web 2.0″ and they they should bring in a real UI designer. I think the UI will grow on many. It’s also funny that a lot of people are comparing it to full scale CMS’s like MT, EE, Joomla, etc., however Wordpress is still a personal publishing platform first. What users do from there determine if it’s meant to be a CMS.
With any initial redesign on software that so widely used, and that is drastically different than the last, you will hear tons of complaints. Unfortunately those complaints normally stand out more than the praises. I still think it’s too early to have a final judgement
I’ve been using Wordpress for about 3 years, and it’s nice to see something different for the admin panel. It’s been the same since I started using it.
There is a fair amount of disagreement over the scrolling issue.
I have been using it for testing for a while and I really like the fact that the settings are all neatly segregated below instead of being in two columns. For me it seems simple and intuitive to just scroll down if I need to change something other than text.
Personally I think that most of the negative reaction is based on a quick look over and not real use so I think most of the gripes will disapear once people actually start using it.
Andrew, I definitely agree. Once people start using it, I don’t think it will be that bad. I don’t understand why so many people complain about the scroll. That’s apart of using the web, and personally, I think people need to get over the fact that everything needs to be above the fold.