WordPress 2.5: no, thank you all the same, at least not yet

Wednesday, March 19th, 2008

Well, I wrote a reasonably detailed critique of WP 2.5 Release Candidate 1 this morning and it’s now gone. I nearly lost my entire blog but after several hours of trying different means to get my SQL database backup to upload, a temporary hijack of the site front page with a gambling URL, and all kinds of swearing, I eventually had to do a fresh install of WP 2.3.3, reactivate my database maintenance plugin, and do an import using that. It took only seconds. I wish I’d tried that before going near the phpMyAdmin tool, which chugged for hours and froze repeatedly because of the database being so big (not that I’m bragging, you understand, ho hum).

If someone has a copy of the article as it appeared on the site’s RSS feed before being lost, please forward it to me, I would be very grateful. It was written and posted at a time beyond the most recent backup, which was yesterday. The site is automatically backed up at least once a day, sometimes more often. My experience today proves the wisdom in doing that.

I decided to bite the bullet and give 2.5 a try, and during the first (and only) 24 hour time-frame everything looked okay. My theme didn’t appear to be broken and the majority of my plugins were still functional. But the plugin I use most often in my posts, Yahoo! Shortcuts, lost its button which, you can no doubt understand, is a pretty dire thing to happen to any software tool that relies on its one big button. It’s not a WordPress fault exactly, although even before 2.5 a bad case of migration fatigue had set in after dealing with numerous point upgrades over the past two years, most of which meant plugins had to be ditched or upgraded as, when and if their developers got round to making them compatible. A modular plugin architecture is both a strength and an Achilles heel at the same time.

To say I didn’t like WP 2.5 is putting it mildly. Acres of white space to the right-hand side of every adminstration page, inducing snow blindness, with all the stuff that used to occupy the margin now pushed below the text entry field. WP 2.5 requires you to scroll, scroll and scroll some more. So many things that used to be easy to find and use are now in collapsed menus that you have to unfurl to access. I’m no coder but I suspect a love affair with AJAX might be at work, which could potentially be bad news for anyone using Internet Explorer, which doesn’t respond well to a lot of fashionable Web 2.0 whizz-bangery. More fool IE users we might say, and I’d be inclined to agree, sometimes, but…

The WP 2.5 interface is supposedly more aesthetically pleasing, but I found it ugly as hell and yet I could clearly figure out the reasoning behind the approach used. By presenting less options initially, the software appears less daunting to newcomers and it’s true that some of the most frequently accessed stuff is more immediately visible. Whether it’s helpful to encourage new users by pissing off established ones is the question to ask. Surely a balance could have been found?

The loss of Draft as a post status left me puzzled. Everyone knows what a draft is, don’t they? Why get rid of it and replace it with a number of far less obvious status declarations? Coming from a professional writing background, this one change alone threw me big time.

Some stuff remains tabbed while other bits are now text links, while the majority of tools I used to be able to reach with one click, maybe two, are buried. If I viewed the new admin interface full-screen on my 24-inch iMac I was able to regain some of the accessibility I’ve long appreciated—which of course is a ridiculous situation—and on the 17-inch MacBook Pro I quickly got tired of scrolling up and down, up and down just to do everyday blogging stuff.

WP 2.5 managed to make blogging much harder work than it should ever be. So I went back to 2.3.3 and have no intention of giving 2.5 another try until we’ve seen a few more point releases—say a 2.5.7 or a 2.5.8–and the development by third parties of usable skins to take the edge off the dreadful new admin interface. I will also be keeping an eye on reviews, forums and other expressed opinions. I won’t say never. I’m definitely saying no thank you, not yet.

The hijack I mentioned above shouldn’t have happened. I still don’t know how it did. I deleted all the 2.5 files from my server and uploaded 2.3.3. I did this after emptying the database and while trying to upload the backup database via phpMyAdmin. During this time the front end of the site displayed a screen asking for the blog name and email address. A friend told me it couldn’t be misused because the database was down but, within minutes, some c*** had named the blog with a URL that when copied and pasted into a browser window took me to a gambling site. So I did a fresh install of 2.3.3, created a new blog with the usual name, was assigned an automatically generated password, logged in using that, switched on my database plugin, uploaded the database backup using that, had to log in again using my usual username and password combination, and that was that. Restored. And yes, it was bloody frustrating.

I lost some comments in the chaos but was able to restore them, albeit without readers’ avatars because the IP address used to post the reconstituted comments was mine, not theirs. My apologies but at least this means no comments have been lost.

Now I have to go make up some time doing other things that should have been done this morning…

UPDATE: Amethyst Dragon forwarded me a copy of my original 2.5 critique, and rather than repost it as a blog entry following this one I’m including it in the comments section below. Thanks AD!

categories: all wired up