2.5 admin backend annoying
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I have to admit, that I’m heavily annoyed by the way the 2.5 admin turned out. I’m using WordPress for years now and with every update it got better. But this one is a step back, by graphic design as by functionality.
Drag’n’drop widgets gone. Huzzah! back to olden days…
Admin-GUI by no means more accessible or more ordered, you find nothingAnd my biggest concern is the new post-GUI: EVERYTHING lined up in one row? gimme a break! categories UNDER the post, so i have to scroll? Image-insertion in a popup??? You cannot be serious?
I installed Fluency to get the admin panel a little more bearable, but I will definitely go back to 2.3.3, I certainly hope there will be security-updates for that version. If not, I will probably switch to another software altogether.
A pity, since I tested quite some blog softwares and WordPress was my favourite…
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I used text widgets to store ad blocks and switched them in and out frequently. Now I have to re-edit them every time I want to change something. This is flat-out stupid. I’ll stick with 2.3.3 for most of my sites, thanks.
@ StrangeAttractor:
2) Since the major revelation of this thread is that this forum is a useless place to discuss concerns like the one I mention above, should we as end-users bring these issues to the mailing lists, or will that be seen as an unwelcome invasion by “non-contributors”?
I agree completely!
As an end-user but not a coder or a designer I feel that me joining any sort of wp-hacks or official coding mailing lists wouldn’t be wanted or even advised. I as a non-coder wouldn’t be wanted on those lists because it’s like going to a party when you’re not invited!
The mailing-list page gives a summary of those groups and they all seem far too serious for someone who really wants changes but doesn’t know how to code or implement them:
“The wp-hackers list is meant for people interested in extending WordPress either through plugins or improvements to the core code. Serious discussion that determines the future direction of the WordPress codebase takes place here.”
I.e. don’t join if you don’t know what you’re doing!
I’m not into who’s saying what about whom, I’d just like a fix/ patch for this “problem”. Sapphire, jabecker, eric23 etc have done wonders in making patches that are fixing problems one by one. So this conversation isn’t pointless, even if it’s not reaching WP-HQ.
Lots on here to respond to, but the most pertinent for me:
jabecker:Mailing lists are not a place to say, “I don’t know any code but please make the admin panels usable again.”
Otto42: True, however I would suggest that maybe there is no place to say that because it is not a useful thing to say. For one thing, you fail to define “usable”. For another, it’s non-specific.This is where I think a lot of the problem lies. Otto wants those complaining to provide quality feedback that makes sense to a developer, or better still, offer solutions, otherwise he feels its pointless. This is not how customer feedback works.
I understand where you’re coming from Otto, but you have to appreciate that not everybody can intelligently articulate why something doesn’t work as well they think it should, and some people simply wouldn’t know what you meant by “non-specific”. You’re making people work too hard to get their point across when they may lack the necessary skills to deliver the kind of useful, quality feedback that you’re looking for. But this doesn’t make their feedback any less valid, you simply need to learn how to look past their ‘flaws’ and help guide them in providing the feedback you need.
When I get complaints from customers about something that doesn’t work the way they would like, I take the time to listen to what they have to say and to try to understand what they mean. All it takes is an openness to listen, to respect that we’re all different and don’t speak in ‘developer terms’ and you’d be amazed what insightful things users come up with that maybe you’d never even realised was an issue.
When you constantly use the language you do, it puts people off responding because you seem to be suggesting that people are stupid or unworthy of the developer’s time unless they can offer solutions. I can’t agree with that and I think it would really help a lot if you could try and see things from a different perspective. You’d be amazed what a positive response you can get from people when you take time to understand them and help guide them. (For the record, I’m talking in terms of general customer feedback, not the specifics of you pointing us to the correct places to get our voices heard).
Otto42: If you have something specific and useful to discuss, then I’d suggest that the wp-hackers list would be a good place. We had this exact discussion about these exact problems 2 months ago on there, and that conversation only got 13 messages. Where were all the ideas then, eh?
Sorry, but that’s absurd. That’s like suggesting every user of any product ever made should always be offering feedback during development of something new, when most companies don’t even advertise the fact that something is in progress. It’s unrealistic and unworkable.
Most WordPress users are not inclined to follow development channels on the off chance that they can intercept and deflect a bad design decision that’s worming it’s way into the next version. But they sure will have opinion about it when the upgrade comes out and those opinions are no less valid than the opinions of the developers who made the changes.
You seem to be saying that we are not entitled to complain about these issues if we didn’t contribute in the first place which I really don’t think makes much sense.
It would be wonderful to have a place dedicated to users saying what they liked and didn’t like and wanted in the future, and developers asking questions until they could see what was needed. I’m disappointed because I thought this forum was such a place and it’s not. I don’t think that the mailing lists or Trac are either.
Exactly. Which is why I made the earlier suggestion that this forum should be made more apparent and possibly even a separate entity on the ww.wp.xz.cn site. It would be a great way of getting the feedback that users want to give and would engender a much better sense of ‘being involved’ for the average user who feels threatened by the technicalities of mailing lists or trac.
There were plenty more comments on the thread that warranted responses, but I’ll just offer this:
Say you have a product that everyone loves and you never receive a compliant. You make a new version and it bombs. 10,000 people email you to say it sucks, with no constructive criticism. You have two initial choices: You can either ask those 10,000 “Why does it suck?” or simply think “They didn’t tell me why it sucks, their opinion doesn’t count.”
If I wanted to stay in business, I know which option I’d choose. (Hint: It’s not the second one!)
Finally, I’d like to say “thank you” to Otto for getting us on the right track about feedback and also to Sapphire, jabecker, eric23 for fixing up the problems we’ve been discussing. I’m looking forward to testing them out.
you seem to be suggesting that people are stupid or unworthy of the developer’s time unless they can offer solutions
“Ideas”, not “solutions”. You don’t have to code up a solution for me to listen, but you do need to have some kind of idea of how to improve the thing that you’re having a problem with. Telling me what you don’t like is fine, but if you really want change, then telling me how you actually would like it to be is much better. If you can back up that idea with examples, then that’s even better. And, obviously, code is the best, but it’s not strictly necessary. 😉
You seem to be saying that we are not entitled to complain about these issues if we didn’t contribute in the first place which I really don’t think makes much sense.
Not at all. I’m saying that it would be nice if more people participated in the development process when it would actually make a difference, instead of after the fact.
Giving your opinion after the software is out there is indeed somewhat useless. Not that the opinion is invalid or anything, but it’s just a bit late is all.
There were two release candidates of 2.5, a working test version up that allowed anybody to login and test it without installing it at all (which is still there, in fact, running the latest code), and half a dozen other ways to participate without putting in a whole lot of effort. There was, and indeed is, plenty of room for more eyeballs on the project.
The mailing-list page gives a summary of those groups and they all seem far too serious for someone who really wants changes but doesn’t know how to code or implement them
It might be worth some of your time to just go and actually read some of the discussions on the lists. The archives are readable by anybody without joining in.
Some of the messages get a bit technical, but then some don’t. The non-technical ones tend to be the bigger discussions. Nobody says you have to respond or read every email on the list, you know.
The wp-testers list is good for this sort of feedback, and the wp-hackers list is a bit more general than I think the description of it indicates.
In the interest of getting some information straight from the horses mouth, so to speak, I sent an email to Matt Mullenweg. I don’t have the text of my email as I used his contact form, but I explained that since the developers aren’t reading the forums, the non-coders among us would like a way to provide feedback and suggestions. Here is his response:
jabecker wrote:
> Is there an alternate location where suggestions can be made that will reach the developers?We do read the forums, and there’s one dedicated to suggestions and voting:
http://ww.wp.xz.cn/extend/ideas/—
Matt MullenwegI know from my own experience that suggestions made there can get added to the WP code. But, in the interest of providing succinct, coder-usable suggestions, perhaps we can use this forum to wordsmith what we’d like to see, and then one of us can enter the suggestion. And then we can all go vote for it. 🙂
The ideas section is indeed read a lot. That’s a good place to make feature suggestions and vote on them. Many of the enhancements in 2.5 came from there.
But a multipage 80+ post thread in the requests and feedback section called “2.5 admin backend annoying”… Do you really think that is going to get a lot of eyeballs on it? Let’s be realistic, who’s going to wade through all that?
Oops. I edited my post to to add a suggestion, and we cross-posted.
I agree suggestions should be in small, usable hunks.
Look, I sympathize, but looking through this thread, almost none of the posts here is either technical enough or contains enough useful suggestions on specifics to be worth putting on the development mailing lists. Software development is not simply about telling somebody what you want the software to do […]
Wow, I was reading this the other day, I think, and the thread had ~60 responses. Now it’s ~120+! Looks like a fire;-)
Actually, there were a lot of useful suggestions on specifics to be worth putting on the development mailing lists!
They are very simple:
1. In ‘Write New Post’ section, Categories, Tags and a few other panels should be be brought to the sidebar.
2. Almost the same should happen in ‘Write New Page’ and ‘Write New Link’.If this is done, this will reduce scrolling up and down by at least a half!:-) Also, the sidebar was organized this way in 2.3.3 and nobody was complaining about it. Now the panels are at the bottom of the ‘Write’ page, and a lot of people asked these panels to go back to the sidebar. This means, how the Write page was designed in 2.3, was better🙂
There are also other good suggestions (allow drag-n-drop for these panels, as it was possible before), and some related to widgets management, etc., but I believe, that points 1) and 2) I just mentioned, is a feature that is wanted by the majority of the WP users.
BTW, I joined a couple of the mailing lists, but for now just reading, and did not express any opinion there, as I am still not sure how to best formulate my thoughts on the interface. And how to suggest the best possible fix – as I said, I am no dev, just a designer and WP user…
Cheers, Michel
Ten minutes of fiddling by my husband and we’ve got a patch incorporating all the previous work from Sapphire, eric23, jabecker etc.
We’ve (or should I say he) moved the post-author into the sidebar to save unnecessary scrolling and have corrected the page-width issue which I know has irritated quite a few (it now fits the screen as opposed to being a set size). My husband is now working to try and get the drafts at the top, but he thinks this would be a lot harder so there are no promises.
If you want to have a look-see, there is a screenshot here and a link to the file here.
I hope that works for everyone – but no promises.
Technical note:
The wp-admin page has had the “Post Author” chunk pretty much cut and pasted into the sidebar.For the width fix, the max-width property in global.css/.wrap has been commented out, which previously was limiting the page width to a nice 97 style 980px… mmm
Most of the issues about 2.5 that have been brought up in this thread are in the extend/ideas section in some form. Here is a list of what I can find, and I urge you to rate and comment on these ideas if they are important. (You might also provide a link to this thread if you do, which will get more eyes looking at it.).
Here’s a list of some of the relevant ones I found:
Idea: Revert the 2.5 Write screen to 2.3
http://ww.wp.xz.cn/extend/ideas/topic.php?id=1354Idea: wp-admin themes separated from core
http://ww.wp.xz.cn/extend/ideas/topic.php?id=832Idea: Choose a better WYSIWYG editor
http://ww.wp.xz.cn/extend/ideas/topic.php?id=55Idea: 2.5: bring back single screen widgets drag-n-drop!!
http://ww.wp.xz.cn/extend/ideas/topic.php?id=1329#post-5237I’m also going to plug one of my own major concerns:
Idea: Security Patches for Earlier Versions
http://ww.wp.xz.cn/extend/ideas/topic.php?id=1293#post-5118Please add to the list, or if there are better/more popular versions of the ideas above, let us know (ideas list is not easy to search through).
PS vintagepretty That’s awesome, can’t wait to check it out!
“Ideas”, not “solutions”. You don’t have to code up a solution for me to listen, but you do need to have some kind of idea of how to improve the thing that you’re having a problem with. Telling me what you don’t like is fine, but if you really want change, then telling me how you actually would like it to be is much better. If you can back up that idea with examples, then that’s even better. And, obviously, code is the best, but it’s not strictly necessary. 😉
You do understand that I’m talking generally about the customer feedback process and not WordPress specifically, right?
You completely ignored the whole aspect of my post relating to customer feedback and how it works. It is a two way street. If a customer cannot provide reasonable information about a problem and what improvements they want, it’s your responsibility as a developer to illicit that information from them. If you don’t do that, you’re simply not serving your customers properly.
Your responses suggest you don’t see it as your responsibility to engage customers in that way. How do you deal with customers who don’t give you the feedback that you need?
In my line of work, I don’t deal with customers, generally speaking. I’m a pure IT guy. Design and implementation. I don’t do requirements, I have other people trained specifically for that job.
I’ve incorporated some of the other changes from eric23, Sapphire, vintagepretty and Mr. vintagepretty and added the “drafts” link back to the Write Post and Write Page panels because that was bugging me, too.
Here is a pic: http://persistentillusion.com/new-page.jpg
Here are the files: http://persistentillusion.com/wp-admin-fix.zip
All the files go in the wp-admin folder. Y’all know the drill. 😉
In my line of work, I don’t deal with customers, generally speaking. I’m a pure IT guy. Design and implementation. I don’t do requirements, I have other people trained specifically for that job.
Yes, I’m one of them, and I make darned good money to do it, thank you very much. Most companies with any sort of customer base or use base have learned that it pays to know what your customers are actually saying.
Cool, thanks jabecker, looking very good!
I posted an idea about improving ww.wp.xz.cn by getting clearer channels for people to offer feedback. Regardless of all other outcomes of this thread, I feel strongly that this issue should be resolved as it’s currently misleading, so if you feel the same way, please take a vote:
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