Matthew Hill

WordPress 2.5 released, and all eyes turn to 2.6 (Download Squad)

Apr 10th 2008 9:45PM Lots of nice new features in 2.5 as you say, but the core, the Write screen, is now broken in my opinion. It’s painful to use and actually worse than the previous version. I believe it was a mistake to move so much stuff from the sidebar; what was previously a streamlined workflow is now disjointed.

The new widgets screen has usability problems too. No drag and drop to and from the sidebars anymore. What took a couple of actions previously now takes up to 11 clicks, though I guess they were trying to make the software more accessible to non-javascript users.

The very respected agency Happy Cog did the IA work on this, and they are experts on user interface design and usability, so I’m a bit bemused about these newly introduced usability problems.

I’ve been trying to get some feedback on the changes, but so far no luck:
http://www.friskdesign.com/blog/2008/04/11/wordpress-gets-it-wrong/">

I’m staying away from 2.5 and will wait to see what happens with the incremental updates.