Eric Mann

Ooh, I can’t buy that one at all. WP is progressing, it won’t roll back. Progressing with WP gets the features as they come. At some point in the future there will be a security upgrade. If we avoid upgrading to avoid certain changes, and then in a year and a half a security upgrade comes down the pipelines, it’s gonna make that security upgrade far more painful I would think.

Over the long term I agree. But the beauty of open source is that you can do with the software whatever you want. There’s no requirement to upgrade so long as you recognize the security risk you’ll be running should you fall too far behind.

And, if you’re really enterprising, you could always backport security patches on your own if the core team doesn’t do it for you. Trac records every commit …

As we move to WordPress being used less and less (percentage wise) primarily as a blogging platform, the sole / singular / main purpose of it’s user-base purely to “write” under the posts section diminishes. Custom Post Type went a long way to kick starting that.

True. WordPress is extensible. So as someone already pointed out, it’s fairly easy to add a plugin that does whatever you want to the admin menu. Look at all the people who were using the Crazy Horse menu (the current left-hand sidebar) as early as WordPress 2.3.

Btw, can you point me to where the “easy to write” copy is on WordPress? I found tons of plugins and themes that have that marketing copy like “we make it easier for you to write with WordPress”, but not so much luck on WordPress.org or .com themselves.

An ideal doesn’t have to be included in marketing copy to be a goal. Having new features and the editors “get out of the way” is something I’ve heard from several members of the core team in person so no, I can’t direct you to a page on a website.

Last Eric, can you tell us how many of the people who constitute the “majority of the community” use WordPress for just “writing” versus company websites, social media marketing, PR, light e-commerce, reviews, domain name sales, ad revenue, affiliate programs, etc. etc. etc.

I’m recycling an old argument that was made to me by the core team when I griped about feature additions (and rejected features) back in WordPress 2.7.

But if you want some rough numbers, there are over 62 million WordPress-powered sites in the world, “about half” are on WordPress.com (ref). If you take a conservative estimate that only 1/4 of all self-hosted installs are “just for writing,” that still gives you more than half of the community that uses WordPress “just for writing” versus company websites, et al.

The problem is, each time one of these decisions is made for us (with no option to revert), it moves another small percentage of users into the “edge case” category.

Actually, the option is to not upgrade. I know, that sounds horrible but think for a minute. WordPress 3.2.1 is secure, so unless you absolutely need the new features added in 3.3, you don’t need to upgrade. If you do want the features, the option instead becomes the choice to write a plugin to go back to the way things were.

When the admin bar was first introduced, so were several plugins that immediately removed it. There’s even a plugin that converts the vertical admin menu back to a horizontal menu at the top of the page (http://wordpress.org/extend/plugins/horizontal-admin-menu/).

The entire point of WordPress is to make it easy to write. That’s been kind of the goal of new features like the Distraction Free Writing Mode, and the easy-to-use drag-and-drop uploader.

Fundamentally, having plugins/themes add “3 different menus to different sections” of the nav menu is a huge design flaw in the plugins/themes. Not WordPress. Every additional menu on the page gets in the way of the user’s primary purpose – to create content.

Having a huge menu with several sections open all the time further detracts from this primary use case. You won’t be changing your timezone settings, permalink options, theme background, widget layout, or active plugins every day. Those options should get out of the way and let you do what you’re entering the site to do – write.

All of your options are still there. All of the menus are still there. We’ve added features (pointers) to allow plugin/theme authors to alert you if/when they add new admin pages (rather than using the Settings API).

WordPress is designed so that new features and feature changes will benefit the vast majority of users. Fact is, if you’re a developer or power user (most of us in this thread are one of the two), then you’re not in that “majority of users” category. The majority of the community uses WordPress to write … not to hunt for settings on different admin pages and tweak options.

Ir sounds like you somehow had a default overwritten.

When WordPress calls the_post_thumbnail() without any arguments, it uses “post_thumbnail” as the default size … not “thumbnail.”

It sounds like your sizes for “thumbnail” are correct (since you can get the_post_thumbnail('thumbnail') to work) … but you site isn’t recognizing “post_thumbnail” as a valid size.

@docfish – I cannot say this strongly enough, DO NOT HACK CORE. If this is a change that absolutely must be made, create a patch and submit it on Trac. If this is a minor change that will fix just your installation but doesn’t belong in core, write a plugin.

If you hack core files, you will lose your changes whenever you update WordPress. If the code you changed really did fix a bug, you lose your bug fix whenever you update and no one else benefits from your work.

You did the right thing by opening a Trac ticket to report the issue. But once you open a bug report, you have to follow up with it. Other developers will ask questions to clarify the issue, and developers will create patches you can test to see if they fix the issue.

If a patch fixes the issue, and the patch is in Trac, there’s a good chance a member of the core team will commit the changes – which means the next version of WordPress won’t have that bug.