Tech Hive

Just in case you were reading the feeds coming in from your dashboard, Wordpress (WP) 2.5 RC1 was released last Tuesday (that’s last March 18). Just last night, because I have too much time in my hands, I downloaded WP 2.5 RC1 and gave it a spin in my local server and here’s what I loved, what I hated and what I think in general.

I won’t be talking (much) about the new features of WP, you can just click on the link provided above to get the whole picture

What I love

There’s a lot of new things to love and watch out for in WP 2.5 and one of them are the simple enhancements that I noticed that I think will be nice for old and new users.

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  I like the fact that I have more freedom in adding categories when I’m in Write Post page. I usually remember to add a certain category when I’m in the middle of writing a post and sometimes I remember that that category should be a child of another one. So what do I do? I go to Manage Categories and add categories from there. Not a very good user experience.

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  One of the things I also liked about WP 2.5 is the action illustrated at the left. When you’re in Manage Links and you click on Write it will bring you to Write Links page. It can be a usability problem though because seasoned WP users are already used to being greeted by a Write Post page when clicking on the Write link and what just happened is a failure to meet their expectations. But, nonetheless, I’m one happy gal whose expectations were not met.

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  I was happy to see that they differentiated the stylesheets from the PHP files. I’m wondering now though, will I be asking too much if I ask that page templates be separated from the rest as well?

  For example, the link and archive templates will be separated from the rest, just to let the user know which is which. I have been editing WP templates for 2 years now and I still find myself a little confused with archive and archives — so yeah, it’s just a personal thing.

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  I also liked the new filtering system in both users and manage posts pages, it makes user and post management easier. Drafts and the other user roles will only be visible if it contains anything which is rather good since it will only be problem to add links to parts of your site that doesn’t have any content yet.

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  What do you expect? They already bought gravatar!

  I was battling with myself whether it’s something I found good or bad or was I just indifferent with it? I have never uploaded a gravatar plugin on any of my blogs but I think gravatar plugins are becoming more and more in-demand the past few months that having gravatars already built-in within WP is a good thing. I wish that I could override it in my profiles page though la la la la la.

What I don’t like (or errors I found)

I haven’t fully tested all of the functionalities in WP 2.5 yet so these are just the interface “errors” I found, most of them are usability errors, I think it’s mostly the case with apps. It’s really hard to maintain a balance, but anyway.

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  One of the things I did as soon as I was able to log in to the new WP admin is to look at what’s new with the dashboard and to my surprise, you can now edit the feeds that are coming at the bottom part of the page!

  I immediately changed the feed URL to Tech Hive’s feed (why I thought it’ll be exciting to read my blog’s feed within my blog, only my subconscious knows) and I was shown the screen above. I wonder why I never had that error before when it was pointing to the default feed? Is it because my posts’ titles are too inconsistent? Shouldn’t they add a height on it or something and truncate the posts’ titles when it exceeds a certain number of characters? I love doing that in our apps when I’m so frustrated with these kinds of problems hehe.

• Then we go to posts, I’ve always thought that WP’s Manage Posts page as one of the most user-friendly pages in the WP admin area because you can see at a glance what to click when you want something done. Unfortunately though, it is not the case with the new revamp.

  

  What should you click if you want to edit the post? The published link? Nope, certainly not. That was my first assumption as well but clicking on the Published link will lead you to the post itself. To edit a page, you have to click on the post’s title itself. So yeah… another user-expectation failed, unlike the one before though, it did not make me a happy gal.

  I was thinking as I was looking at the list, why didn’t they just use images for the view, edit and delete links to save space just like what they did with the comments? (Oh yeah! I just realized that the delete link is missing! Do I have to go to the individual posts just to delete it?! Yeah, yeah I’m lazy, the earlier versions of WP made me into this.) Failed to notice that there’s a checkbox at the left side of the row.

• Another user expectation failed — the buckets in the write post page (for the lack of term to use) are not draggable anymore.

  

  I don’t know about other users, but I definitely use more of the custom fields than the trackbacks. Heck, I probably even use custom fields more than the excerpt! Sure, trackbacks are probably way important for some — to each his own as the saying goes, so why didn’t they make it draggable anymore?

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  I’m normally not very picky but ever since I became too busy with work and offline life, I started future-dating my posts on my blogs. So I looked for it and was a little sad until I noticed the “Post Immediately” text at the right side with the small edit link beside it.

  Why hide it? (Then others would counter with “What happened to “To each his own?”?”)

  Anyway, the reason why I added it here is because it’s very easy for this feature to be overlooked. I wouldn’t be surprised if I see several posts in the support forum looking for the feature where they could future-date their posts.

I know that some of the things I mentioned above are very easy to learn, but one of the things in usability, as what Jakob Nielsen stated in one of his books (forgot which, sorry), is that you should always assume that the person who will be using your app is someone who doesn’t know anything at all about your app. Then ask yourself these questions:

1. Will they be able to learn how to use this app with little to no assistance from other people?
2. Does this icon explain where it will lead the user?
3. Is the link self-explanatory?
4. What else can I do to lessen the actions required from the user in finishing this certain task? (e.g. uploading an image)
5. Will they be able to notice that this icon is here at first glance? Is it easy to be overlooked?

Additional Thoughts

• Instead of write, why not just rename it to create and enable the users to add images and galleries there since those are already built in?

  Makes no sense in making me go to the Write Post page when all I want to do is add an image or prepare a gallery for the images I’ll be uploading.

• Plugins is one of the most important components in Wordpress, why does it have to be smaller?

So there goes my first impressions of WP 2.5, have you tested it yet? I think I’ll need to test it with all of the plugins I’m currently using installed to see if anything breaks. Hope everything is (will be) compatible with 2.5