Just a note - if you’re looking for the week in walks, they’ll be up tomorrow, pictures and all. However, WordPress 2.5’s release is more recent news, and an issue that I believe is worth pushing my normal schedule back a day for. 
I bit the bullet and installed WordPress 2.5 on my testing blog, and I’ve been playing with it for a few hours now, and my impression is that the number of things I don’t like far outweigh the number of things I do like. Before I get to my critique, however, I have a couple of important questions.
First, why was this released on a Saturday? Every other major release of software - free or not - has happened on a weekday. To have something as seemingly major as WordPress 2.5 released on Saturday suggests to me that the folks at Automattic almost wanted this release to be as low-key as possible, as most of the “major” web writers usually go at a more relaxed pace on the weekend.
The next question I have is pointed at everyone who is raving over the new interface - what specifically about it makes this particular version superior to the old interface? All I’ve seen are generalities. Something tells me that a lot of this is related to a disease known as “fanboyism” (which I know doesn’t exist, but is noted by the almost-fanatical praise heaped by certain people whenever something comes from one place, no matter how poor it is), and that is never a good thing as it allows hype to take over real substance.
The last question I have, and this is something that I’ll keep coming back to throughout my discussion of dislikes, is about this supposed research that they did. Who exactly did they ask for input? It seems like they’ve asked some quite inept people to get their suggestions when it comes to getting an opinion on the current dashboard’s so-called downfalls.
I’ll be reasonable, however, and let you in on the couple of things that I do like -
Things I like
First, is that in the Theme editor (under Presentation Design -> Theme Editor), they’ve split up the template and style files into their own groups. Actually, I’m surprised they didn’t try to prettify that and manage to totally screw it up in the process. Sure that’s a dumbed-down option that they did, but it’s quite useful when you consider that currently, all the files are listed in one big list.
Another thing that I like is the addition of a link to edit a newly-published post. Also, the fact that they did make the size of the fonts smaller wasn’t a bad idea either.
And that’s about where this ends.
Things I don’t like
Where do I start with this? There are a lot more things that I don’t like about the new admin panel, but let’s start with the most obvious one -
New-look menus
Instead of sticking with the normal set of menus, they decided to split the main toolbar into two parts - with the connections between them being loose at the best. Thankfully, it’s easy to hack the admin-header.php file to get the Plugins, Options Settings, and Users down with the rest of the menu items, it’s something that shouldn’t have to have been done in the first place (not to mention that cForms and Polls are now to the left of these other sections). Also, the dashboard is an integral part of the WordPress admin panel - why is the link to that relegated to a teeny-weeny link in the upper left that almost blends into the background?
Widget redesign
Pardon my French, but what the fuck were they thinking when they thought this one up? Actually, what the fuck were they smoking and/or drinking at the time? I’d like to have a sample. 
Since I’ve been using WordPress, the Widget page has been a straight-forward drag-and-drop affair where you could take the available widgets (at the bottom of the page) and drag them up to either sidebar. You could also have multiple text widgets at your disposal, and if you wanted to take one away for a short while, all you had to do was drag it out of the sidebar and it’d be saved.
Now? Well, now you can only work on one sidebar at a time, and those saved text widgets you had off of the sidebar before you upgraded? Gone. Hope you saved the code to them.
Oh, by the way, if you remove a text widget from a sidebar - you can say goodbye to whatever text was in there before. It’s not saved. It was something important? Sorry, but it’s not OK to take text widgets away anymore; game over, you lose.
The other thing that is completely ass-backward is that they show you all available widgets, including those you already have activated. How useless is that?
Like whitespace?
If you’re a fan of completely wasted space on a webpage, then you’ll love a lot of the pages in WordPress 2.5! Why? Well, on most of them, there’s a maximum width of just less than 1000 pixels. It wouldn’t be so bad if it was centred on the page, but infinite wisdom was used to put it all aligned to the left. Fortunately, if you’re using Stylish, you can create a new style for your URL and put this in between the curly braces -
.wrap, .updated, .error {
max-width: 100% !important;
}
.narrow {
width: 100% !important;
}
That will fix one of the few things you can actually fix on your own.
Categories are dead. Long live tags.
Or that’s what they want you to believe when you look at the write screen. Instead of the current setup of having categories at the top of the right hand column, easily accessible, they put them at the bottom of the write screen (where you can’t move the elements anymore, like you used to), under tags. The message here is clear - categories are less important than tags.
Gaping security hole
One of the more ballyhooed new features in this new version is the ability to automatically upgrade plugins from your plugin page. On my site, I had tried out a different plugin that allowed me to do just that, but it didn’t work because of server permissions that there are.
However, WordPress have made a great decision to usurp any server’s security when it comes to running zip files by including its own unzipping program in the WordPress install - that’s got to be part of the reason why the zip file is 30% larger than it was previously. By doing this, anyone running a plugin has the potential of opening themselves up to a major problem with their server by upgrading to a new version of a plugin that has a malicious file in it.
The chances of this happening are slim, but it is not outside of the possible realm of things that can happen. Fortunately, there is a way to fix this and to break the plugin upgrade function - set the permissions of the wp-content/plugins folder to 555, thus making it read only, and forcing an error on the update page.
Lazy time
The last item I have on my list of dislikes is that they’ve changed the way you select your timezone - it used to be that you just typed in a number, say, -6 for Central Standard Time, like you would on a forum run by SMF. However, apparently in these supposed interviews, they discovered that people had a hard time typing in a simple combination of a plus or minus sign and a number between 0 and 14. It’s been replaced with a drop-down box with selections for timezones, with minor half-hour intervals.
Overall initial verdict
If I had to give a grade to their efforts in regards to what they did, I would give them a grade of about 60/100, or just barely a D-minus in school grading terms. The biggest thing that they lose points for is the rule of “don’t fix something that ain’t broke”. The Admin interface in previous iterations of WordPress worked perfectly, and were, after a bit of a learning curve, very intuitive.
However, doing patently stupid things like splitting the options panel into two distinct menus, making the dashboard into the least important thing in the dashboard (by the way, where can you see the stats for your blog? the stats sub-panel under the dashboard has gone missing.), and making everything fixed width only goes to hurt the cause further.
Unfortunately, it seems that the folks who are at the head of WordPress are only more concerned with glorifying their latest release, but don’t be surprised if there are urgent updates to 2.5 coming out as soon as a week from now, as it seems that they’ve gotten creative with the roadmap, making up nearly 30% of the overall progress in their planning within a week or two.
As far as my site is concerned, I’m going to stick with 2.3.x series WordPress releases for at least the near future. Maybe if someone comes out with an admin theme that looks like the old version, and maybe fix the widget issue (come on, they seriously fucked up there).
What do you all think about this release? More importantly, do you know anyone who was interviewed to help them out? I’m sure that there are a lot of people out there who would love to know how they came to the conclusion that this was “needed”.
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