WP 2.5, How I Hate Thee
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Over the weekend, I upgraded my blogs to WordPress 2.5 and, while it only took five minutes a piece, I wish I could have that time back. Or, more accurately, I wish I’d never spent it on upgrading.
I hate WP 2.5. I hate absolutely everything about it, from the watery looking color scheme of the admin panel that clashes so horridly with the occasional shots of tangerine orange to the way the entry-editing screen is now squashed to the left of my screen. (Why all the unnecessary white space? Why can’t I have an entry-writing screen that occupies the bulk of my screen?)
The admin layout’s changes are so drastic that I now find myself lost doing tasks that I used to be able to do while half-asleep. That’s slowing me down and that’s something I don’t like.
New users and those who are less software literate, on the other hand, seem to love the changes. Bully for them. But WordPress did a disservice to those of us who’ve been using it for years and didn’t realize that an “upgrade” meant having to relearn basic admin panel navigation.
As Raj said when explaining his own hatred of WP 2.5:
I’m a freelancer and time is money. There’s only so much time I have available to waste on new software that violates general development principles.
Ditto here. Unfortunately, I’d already “upgraded” all of my sites before realizing this. Now I’m stuck… at least for however long I remain using WordPress.
Frankly, I hope someone come up soon with a plug-in that reverts the Dashboard and admin features to their old layout. Otherwise, I might just be kissing WordPress goodbye once and for all.
This entry was posted on Wednesday, April 16th, 2008 at 11:45 am and is filed under From The Management. Responses are currently closed, but you can trackback from your own site.
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Top Commenters
You are not alone. I too dislike WP 2.5. While I feel it has some great features, I dislike the knew way you add images. I use Firefox and had had to view in full screen just to add images. In IE, I kept getting an error message. In all- I’m NOT impressed.
Rose’s last blog post..A Sunday Drive - Signs of Spring in Photos
Thanks for letting us know, Kate. I have not upgraded yet.
I am a serious lover of technology, but I always hate upgrades. I have a policy of waiting at least a month, so all the bugs are discovered and all of the opinions are aired. This leaves me behind, but it is usually worth it (as in this case).
I hope it ends up working out for you.
Charity’s last blog post..The Free-Market and Product Safety
That is so weird, your CommentLuv picked up a post from February.
Charity’s last blog post..This and That
That really IS weird. Looks like it got it right the second time. How strange.
I am SO GLAD the only domain I “upgraded” wasn’t my major domain. Although, I am getting tired of being told to UPGRADE NOW every time I log into my admin panel. VERY ANNOYING. I’m an adult, I think I can figure out if I want to upgrade or not all on my own…
I am a very new blogger - my blog has been running less than three weeks, and it’s still in a very rudimentary state. That’s okay, because the whole point of my blog is to use it as a learning base to teach myself how blogging works.
Which leads to my question: Kate, would you say that your frustration has anything to do with v2.5 in itself, or is it more a thing of having to re-learn a lot of simple tasks that in v2.3 are ingrained in your habits? My blog is so new that I haven’t developed the habits yet, and if it’s simply a matter of having to learn the platform, whatever version it might be, I’m wondering if it wouldn’t be safe for me to upgrade while I’m still a youngster at this.
I hate upgrading, too. It makes things go nutso.
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Jerry, I’m certain 90% of my frustration involves having to re-learn software that I’d been using for years without problems.
That’s one of the reasons I didn’t want to upgrade at all, but between the annoying “Upgrade NOW!” message on the admin panel that Lisa mentioned and the fact that Technorati’s no longer indexing blogs running WP 2.3.3, I caved in.
I wish I hadn’t - in the past 2 days it’s taken me three times longer to write entries than it did before. When time is money — and particularly when you always feel short on both — those irritations seem mighty big.
I wish I never updated as well. But then, I use ScribFire most of the time to write my blogposts, but then, I sometimes need to edit in WP. And the interface is just so … not very user-friendly. I don’t know if it’s just me but the Write Post page if it’s on WYSIWIG mode, it covers up the part where you can click on Publish so I have to click back to code mode. and then it ruins everything that I have to re-edit things.
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I haven’t tried it with the WYSIWYG editor, but that would be enough to drive me nuts.
I have a plugin that makes the admin area look different - it is the Fluency admin plugin. Try it out, maybe you’ll like it.
I didn’t measure the writing area but it seems bigger then just the upgraded version.
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Fluency didn’t work for me for some reason — I’m not sure if it was a conflict with another plug-in or due to my Firefox browser. I downloaded a different plug-in - “Remove Max Width” that widened the admin area which made me much happier.
Is it just me or my webhost or it’s really slower?
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It’s hard to know. It seems slower to me, but then again *everything* seems slower to me because of all of my browser’s add-ons that are now conflicting with the last Firefox update.
I totally get a lot of your frustrations Kate. And while I’m happy I upgraded, I had the learning curve on my own time on my design demo site.
We do however share one annoyance and that’s the fixed instead of fluid width screen. Wanted to tell you, I installed a plugin that’s working great for me. It’s Remove Max Width.
I also upgraded again today to 2.5.1 and it’s working so it should do just fine for you.
Good luck, hope it starts to get easier for you.
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Oh, Katy, I love that plug-in. Thanks! Wish I could get Fluidity to work on my browser but it won’t. Not sure why.
But WP 2.5 did get easier. It’s not as intuitive to me as the others were but, as I understand things, it’s more intuitive to n00bs and that’s a good thing.
Meanwhile, can I interest *you* in the guest article offer I’ve extended???