gambit37

I have to agree with this, there is still too much HTML generated within the core code of WordPress, making true extensibility a nightmare to manage and maintain, in particular when it’s time to upgrade.

At some point, I would love for WP to receive a cor re-write that addresses this issue. The problem is that it’s so popular, any substantial re-write that breaks backwards compatibility will alienate a good portion of its users.

Is WordPress doomed to the MySpace Malaise?

I know it’s not strictly an “Idea” as such, but I’ve posted a new idea in the Ideas section to revert the write screen back to the 2.3 functionality. If you want things back the way they were, it might be worth voicing your support there too:

http://wordpress.org/extend/ideas/topic.php?id=1354

I upgraded to 2.5 for some nice features that I wanted on one particular site I’m building, and I’ll stick with it for that site. But I’ll stick with 2.3 for my other blogs as a lot of the new stuff is simply badly designed. Chiming in with my own observations:

1) I agree with many posters here: moving categories and some of the other things from the sidebar to below the Write panel is really, really dumb. This stuff was easily accessible in the sidebar before, now I’m constantly scrolling about to find what I need to do, and a load of useful space on the side of the screen is now wasted.

2) Automatically creating a permalink as I start typing is also stupid. Serious bloggers wnat to create post slugs themeselves and often the title of the post won’t be the slug. Why should I have to edit something I didn’t want in the first place? This was a silly choice.

3) The media management is really bad. I thought it would be a proper tool: you know, like I could actually use it to, oh, I don’t know, manage my media? Why then can’t I add new media through it’s menu option? I can’t stand having to go into a post just to add some new media items, that’s really, really dumb, esepcially if I want to use them in multiple posts. I had also hoped to see some of Flexible Upload’s features in there: being able to specify a thumbnail size on the fly and also whether to use the width or height to resize against. While I think the new uploader IS better, it’s still missing a load of useful features.

I don’t reallyknow what’s going on with Happy Cog these days. They are a well respected agency, yet after Zeldman’s recent “stance hopping” on IE8’s traget switching behaviour, and this rather odd “upgraded” of WP, I’m beginning to wonder if they are losing the plot a little.