Tell Me This Horrible New WordPress Dashboard Is A Joke!?!?!?
April 4, 2008
What the hell?!?!?! If this is the new WordPress Dashboard and it’s going to be forced on all users, I’m jumping ship. This has to be the most awkward, ugliest, all-around most horrible user interface I have seen. Aside from Typo3…
Seriously…everything is garbled about, the color scheme is bland, and where everything was previously nicely separated and a bit intuitive…this looks like someone threw up inside my monitor.
I hope this is just some joke. Someone tell me that the WordPress team hasn’t handed off the design to some high school kid who is colorblind…
It’s been a long time since I have felt so…claustrophobic using an interface. Anyone else think this is like taking three steps backwards? The whole Web 2.0 interface with pop-up windows to upload images (windows I cannot reposition and which have f@%&!ng scroll bars in them…) just sucks!
The Categories panel for marking your posts is incredibly wide and mouse movements that were previously a couple inches now feel like crossing the state on an overnight trip. There’s not enough space on the left-hand side of the interface and far too much on the right. Options have become obfuscated, the entire interface confusing.
This will be my last blog post until they restore the old interface or come up with something better. In the mean-time, I’m going to investigate other blogging platforms. I am in the process of launching some commercial sites with WordPress being used as a CMS. If this is the direction of the software however (backwards rather than forward), I must reconsider and find another solution. This simply won’t do.
[Note: Normally, I'm appreciative of Open Source efforts and have always been of WordPress. But to force this on users and not offer any choice or option...that's decidedly like some Microsoft practice, and I thought WordPress stood for the exact opposite of what this new Dashboard represents.]
Entry Filed under: Blogging, Blogroll, Blogs, Everything Else, Internet, Life, Marketing, Media, News, Opinion, Publishing, Random, Random Thoughts, Social Issues, Software, Tactics, Thoughts. .
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1.
atomcat | April 4, 2008 at 8:05 pm
Hell, I thought their system was in some kind of semi crash mode. I’m having a hard time just looking at it.
Intuitive it’s not - ugly it is.
I’ve been using WordPress for a year and a half and it kept getting better.
Please tell me this is a belated April Fools joke. Ha Ha
Otherwise it’s just not funny.
2.
Sean Wilson | April 4, 2008 at 8:11 pm
Some kind of crash mode…that was exactly my first thought as well, lol. I cannot imagine a single user that would have wanted this over what we had before.
Except maybe that colorblind teenager who wanted to geek about with AJAX and all the Web 2.0 cliches/technologies. Yeah, I totally thought something was broken. Actually, I think it is. I can’t get rid of spam comments, posts appear and disappear….
If I were a project manager responsible for this end result, I would full expect to get fired and find future work scarce!
Thanks for dropping by to add your voice to the dissenting opinion!
3.
Crystal | April 4, 2008 at 8:17 pm
I’m with you on this one. I kept logging off and on thinking that they were down for maintenance, only it was still there.
VERY frustrating!
4.
Sean Wilson | April 4, 2008 at 8:32 pm
Crystal — while I didn’t log on and off, I did refresh my browser about two dozen times, purged my browser cache, etc. This is the first time I think an online experience has actually felt traumatic.
And I only wish that were a huge exaggeration…
Thanks for dropping by to share your thoughts. Have a wonderful evening!
5.
rsaling | April 4, 2008 at 9:14 pm
The screen would disappear on me after about 5 seconds….
Now that my site is getting more established, also want more analytics which they won’t allow or provide. I guess it is about time to find another host and develop the blog from scratch with the bells and whistles I want and without the ugly dashboard that won’t even stay up on my screen.
rsaling.wordpress.com
6.
Sean Wilson | April 5, 2008 at 3:38 pm
Hi, and thanks for dropping by to chime in on the topic. It appears the new Dashboard is indeed a bit buggy. I have my own hosting account and have been in the process of developing some sites based around using WordPress as a CMS, however this changes everything.
I feel as if the past year+ that I have spent going through the guts of WordPress and learning templating and how to tweak the code so it could be used as a CMS is now wasted. I simply can’t work in the new interface and I certainly have tried. It’s just a horrible interface. If I were a better PHP programmer and had the time and resources, I would be tempted to fork WordPress right now and develop down a new path using the previous release.
Maybe it’s for the best, though. I had thought to be able to enable clients to have an easy to manage website CMS/blogware combination that didn’t require a ton of mods and plugins and felt I was getting there. As much as I am an advocate for Open Source, it comes with a caveat–and that is to ‘protect thyself.’
Just as I have written that search dependency is bad for a business model, so can reliance of a particular CMS (content management system). That’s one of the reasons I advocate the need for an Information & Content Management Language that would allow a universal interface language that would allow data and content workers, managers and users to take their skills and templates and the entirety of their content and data and migrate it from any blogware or CMS to any other blogware or CMS.
Until then, I’m looking at my options. Here are some I like…
Joomla CMS (huge array of plugins, vibrant community)
MODx CMS (standards, growing community, FoxyCart support)
Nucleus CMS (extensible, clean, easy to use)
b2evolution (a multilingual multiuser multiblog blog engine)
You can take a look at all of them and try out demos at:
OpenSourceCMS.com
7.
Red | April 15, 2008 at 10:20 pm
I like the word “Claustrophobic”
That sums it up quite nicely.
8.
Sean Wilson | April 15, 2008 at 11:58 pm
Red, thank you for dropping by and sharing your thoughts. Claustrophobic was the first thing that popped into my mind as I explored the new dashboard. I was reminded of a particularly narrow squeeze in a cave I had been crawling about in to explore once. It felt pretty much the same, only not adventurous or interesting…just the worry of getting stuck and unable to move about.
Have a wonderful day.
9.
Alex Mountjoy | May 8, 2008 at 11:29 pm
A step backward, for sure. I’m looking for some kind of “skin” just to make the process of making posts palitable to me.