Customer Street and UFindUs Web Design

WordPress 2.5 was finally released on March 29th 2008. It had been in development by the people of the WordPress community for about 6 months and as it’s been live on the Customer Street blogs for about a week now I thought I’d comment on it.

The Upgrade ?

The upgrade was straight forward enough. Just upload the newer version on to your server and overwrite the old one. Then when you go to log in you click the link to update the database tables.

Job done.

First Impressions

Really nice looking. I can’t complain at that. If you want to see it in action there is the WP 2.5 4 minute screen cast that you can watch.

The quick links on the Dashboard are ideal so you can get straight down to blogging, and at fist glance, not alot has moved. I was then proved wrong.

Usability

When you start to use the new WP 2.5 it’s a different story. Fair enough, if this is the first time you have used WordPress then you will love it. But, if you’ve been using it for a while (a couple of years in my case) then you may start pulling your hair out.

Customer Street has about 8 self hosted WordPress Blogs along with several on the wordpress.com domain. I have asked the users of these blogs to comment on their experiences in the last week.

Here’s what they say:

The new version of WordPress 2.5 is a very big disappointment. The looks are better(ish) but I was expecting more. One thing I love is the comments indicator, makes life easier as you can see visually from wherever you are in the backend. I did prefer the category section on the right as it is all on screen when posting rather than having to scroll down the screen. I am sure there will be updates and the small niggles will be ironed out. Here’s hoping.

Lee Johnson - SEO Manager (Customer Street SEO)

This new version left me scratching my head for 10 minutes trying to work out how to post my article. In the end I had to resort to asking Neil for help. This new version seems to have lost some of the more intuitive functionality of previous versions.

Mark Nichols- Business Process Manager (Customer Street Improvements)

I personally have a few things that I like and don’t like about the new version.

Things I like:

• The upgrade was really easy
• Love the general look of the new admin
• The layout of the manage pages and comments page is a lot easier on the eye and easier to understand
• The comment management is a lot easier
• User management is much easier

Things I don’t like:

• On the Dashboard, why is it so cluttered ? I bet it’s not long before a plugin is written to remove all this and tidy it up a bit.
• On the post page, why have the categories moved below the WYSIWYG box ?
• This is the same when you’re adding a new page. All the old sidebar options like page parent, page template etc. have been moved below the post.
• The ‘Add Media’ buttons make it easier to add media to your post however I have had it on several occasions where I have uploaded images, inserted them in to the post and for some reason disappear when published.

As Lee mentioned in his comment, these are small niggles. I’m a huge fan of WordPress and have about 20 websites that utilize the software.

A big thanks

This is the way I plan to continue so I would like to offer my thanks to the main developers of WordPress along with thanks to all the WordPress community for writing useful articles, themes and plugins.