Sephy’s Platzish

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”.

I don’t know where it went wrong with what I did when I posted my first attempt at editing a theme, but what happened was something that, to this day, still confounds me quite a bit. Just to recap the story up to here, I had found a theme that I liked for my blog, but after finding some major flaws with it (i.e. “F–K THIS” written out in the header, the CSS file being lumped together in one big chunk), I changed themes to this one. However, I then wanted to revisit the theme and see if I could improve upon it. The final result wound up being my first foray into theme tweaking.

However, I made a critical error in that post - I took the initiative to find the actual site of the person who created the theme, and linked to his post that announced the original release of it. I made sure to give the credit where it was due, because a lot of the hard work was done already, and I thought that the original creator would not have issues with having a theme redone (with all original links left intact in the theme’s files - even though they go to sites which aren’t the same as when the theme was made originally).

Clearly, I was wrong.

I published the post at 11.44PM, and got a comment shortly afterward, but about 6 hours after publishing, I got this notification of a new comment -

That was followed, almost immediately after, by an email about a new contact form that I received, with a similar message -

Now, after receiving these messages, I dutifully did what I was asked by him to do - removed the download link. I would have thought that it was enough to just do that, but apparently he didn’t like my only doing that - he wanted the whole thing scrapped, so about 12 hours after the first comment was dropped, I received this comment -

The hilarious thing about all of this is that he claims to hold copyright over that particular theme, but a quick inspection of the theme’s files yields nothing in the way of a license, or even a copyright notice in the CSS file (which is the standard place for doing things like that). Even themes released with a license are released under the GPL license, which allows you to modify the work, so long as you keep record of the originator of the work, which I had done. After receiving the mails and contact forms, it was time to do a bit of a mea culpa, by sending an email with a profuse apology for any infringements:

Any even-handed person probably would have taken note of the fact that I hadn’t done this before, and been slightly lenient about it, even possibly allowing the download to be available again. Again, I was wrong. This was the reply that I received to my email:

It was at this point that I started to do some searching into his supposed claims over copyright and everything to do with him, and this brought up an interesting revelation. Let me share the line I used when I found this bit of information out -

[1/13/2008 8:13:51 PM] Sephy says: hmm…i was assuming that he had dangly bits, apparently i’m wrong…M1l0 IllVIl has the right to contact and demand Participant to remove any non-suitable display or use of her work at any time (without reasons or explanations necessary).

That line was culled from her page with all the disclaimers she holds, which also has this hilarious bit of text, which would mean anyone who has downloaded one of her themes and changed even one thing would be in violation of these disclaimers -

Participant also agrees not to alter, disassemble, decompile, reverse engineer, or otherwise modify the Downloaded Material.

By that same logic, anybody who uses one of themes at all without asking her permission would fall afoul of this line -

ANY USE OR PARTIAL USE OF THE IMAGES; ILLUSTRATIONS; SENTENCES OR LOGOS OF M1L0I11IVII WORKS WITHOUT PERMISSION IS STRICTLY PROHIBITED

After that, Snoskred said that I should go ahead and re-release the theme without any of the supposedly copyrighted things - images, sentences, etc. In other words, release the theme as my own original work. There were a few other revelations that were discovered in searching her site. I did a little bit of digging into her site and found a post about a forum that this person had created. Now, for someone who had such a fit over one person modifying one of her themes, I was shocked to find this tidbit in the post -

post your modified m1l0 themes with screenshots

That sounds like a completely different story to what she was complaining about to me. In fact, if you look at the thread in which the themes are posted, one person asked if he could post his themes for others to use. The most hilarious thing is that the reply from her to his post was saying that his way of showing off the edited themes was the way it was intended! Anyone smell the irony?

Along with what I’d done already, I’d sought the input of someone who has done quite a bit of theme modification, and basically, they told me that if they were asked to take something down, they would. It was with that bit of information that I decided that maybe, the best way to handle this was to let her go on her way and let this go away as it was something that I didn’t need to deal with. That doesn’t mean that I had started to draft a reply back to her in response to her second email. This is what it looked like after I had stopped working on it -

But, the story doesn’t end there.

A couple of days later, she sent me another email that was very different to the other emails, which made the whole situation even more strange, as this was a mail that was actually halfway polite. This is what she sent -

For sure, it’s an interesting query; however, if you think about it taking and modifying a theme (with, as I noted in my reply to her, none of the acknowledgements changed), and try to correlate it to someone scraping your blog’s content, it doesn’t make any sense.

As it is, my plans for the near term when it comes to WordPress themes is that I’m going to take some time and read the information that is available on the WordPress codex in relation to writing your own themes. I have some ideas for my own. I might just start out with the sandbox theme to start with, just to get my bearings as to what is involved in a theme.

Posts I liked -

• The geekfest known as SXSW was held recently, and apparently some passive agressive notes were found - I especially like the last photo
• A couple of posts from the Russians - first up, an amazing natural phenomenon where the sun’s light is reflected to show multiple suns.
• If you’re a fisherman at this time of the year, read this post for a reminder why you don’t drive your car on ice. It takes about 2 feet of ice to safely carry a car, but I wouldn’t even consider going on it myself.
• Cugat’s found himself with a new Easter tradition. Though, if some movements were taken out, it’d be better. (fortunately, we don’t have to do the kneeling thing at my church, but we did have to change books every song…)

New blogs this week in the US Blogs community at BumpZEE -

• EZGreatLife.com
• Indie Fashion Revival
• Beauty Badass
• TurnStreet Blog Central

Keywords -

• channel 58.4 ncaa - Well, as far as I know, 58.4 is not being used anymore, and the second game is visible on 58.3; the multicasting that had been in action the last few years has gone away in preference to having a game in HD.
• passive income - How the heck did you get here from there? Anyway, I know your intentions were to spam my blog. It’s just too bad that Akismet liked your comment sir.
• how do databases work - free information - Er, you might be better off going to Wikipedia.
• blogger typeface? - You can set that in the customize panel, or in the template.

This week around the blog, I talked about the release of WordPress 2.5; I’ve tried out the demo that’s available, but I’m still not impressed. I also talked about how the state can’t get its act together when it comes to speed limits.

Then, on Saturday, a message on Skype led to me talking about how one plugin developer is not making friends at all with his actions. I also gave some advice to parents out there - make sure your kids know what to say on the phone, ok?

Coming up, I actually have a draft started for posting; it’s a lot easier to have drafts when you have an offline blog editor. And speaking of offline editors, I gotta say that I’ve been won over by another one, and it’s from a surprising source.

’til next week y’all!

I got a message from Snoskred not too long ago asking if I could see a certain page - it was a page that I had recognized from a while ago as having been something that I’d seen when trying to download a plugin for WordPress one time. If you’re curious, the page is visible by clicking here. However, I wouldn’t bother because it’s just a page advertising some bogus bollocks that this guy has a direct interest in.

The big thing isn’t the fact that she was asking me about this page, it was the reasoning behind her asking. I’ll got into it a bit more, but if you’re short for time, you can read Snoskred’s post about it on the Aussie Bloggers Forums.

Basically, one of the plugins that is used on blogs that she sets up is one called Different Posts Per Page. The function of it is pretty obvious - it allows you to set the number of posts you want to appear on archive pages, along with the number you want on the front page. Up until the most recent update, it would install perfectly fine. However, the latest version of the plugin now has a registration procedure, which is completely ridiculous.

So, who is this guy?

The author of this particular plugin is a gentleman in Nepal who specializes in writing WordPress plugins which, to be completely honest, are some of the most annoying out there - for example, one that creates, as he says, an “Attention Grabbing Unblockable Popup in Wordpress”. The hilarious thing is that he claims that this plugin will have these “instant benefits” -

• More blog subscribers
• More RSS feeds subscriptions
• Direct people to special offers
• Provide effective updates
• Increase sales
• Increase Leads

Personally? If it were me who had to face this popup on my window that is “unblockable”, my first instinct would be to close the tab and not bother. I suspect that there are a lot of people who would fall in that same boat. By the way, it’s in Javascript, so if you’re running NoScript, then you won’t see the popup.

Anyway, a few months ago, I was searching for a plugin that would do what DPPP does, and that was about the only one that I had found. The problem at the time was that I searched using Google, and wound up at his page for the plugin. As you can see at the bottom of the page, there is a huge DOWNLOAD NOW link, and at the time I first even tried to download it, I got redirected. Thanks to that redirection, there is an email account which has gotten emails from this guy somewhere around twice a week; it’s not consistent, but if it were my main account, I’d find it quite annoying.

In fact, when I went through this arduous process, and wound up at the page listed at the top, I sent this message to Snoskred on Skype -

i hate to take you away from your focus, but the link that i was given to get the plugin, it’s a fucking ad! - http://www.maxblogpress.com/oto/index.php?p=dppp

Then the next, as it might seem, knife was stuck into my back - I found that it was available on the WordPress Plugin Directory. When I found that out, I emailed the bloke who did this. This is what I wrote

Dear sir,

I am extremely displeased at the amount of red tape that I was forced to go through in order to download a plugin that isn’t even hosted on your server. In fact, if I had known that it was listed on the WP plugin page, I would have never bothered giving you my email address, signing up for a newsletter I’m not interested in receiving, and wasting my valuable time scrolling through a page of worthless junk that I’m not interested in buying, just to be directed to a download hosted on WordPress’s servers.

Regards,
Sephyroth

Oddly enough, he never replied to me. The story would have ended there with me finding it on the WordPress site, but things changed.

A new release

About a month ago, a new version of this plugin was released, version 1.7. With it came a sign that maybe Pawan didn’t like people being able to use his plugin like any other plugin out there (aside from Akismet and wordpress.com stats, which require a WordPress API key to work, and for which there is a purpose for doing that) without him getting some cut of the action.

For anyone wanting to download and use the plugin, you wouldn’t know anything was unusual until you would install it on WordPress and activate it. At that point, you’re told that you are now required to register to use this plugin. This time, however, you don’t have a choice as to the email address you subject to the onslaught of spam - it’s the address listed as the admin for the site!

As with any of this guy’s other products, in order to complete this process, you have to visit that ad page linked at the top of the page.

If you read the documentation for this product, which is nearly non-existent (simply because any of the functions you’d expect in a readme are just links to his site!), you would find this as the changes for the most recent version. Most people would consider the addition of a registration requirement important enough to mention, but here’s what you get -

= Version 1.7 (02-21-2008) =
* Updated: Some minor improvements.

Not much information there, eh?

Also, none of the information pages that show how to use this plugin mention a single thing about registration - basically what this guy is doing is bait and switch.

What you can do

If you’re a user of the Different Posts Per Page plugin, the simplest thing that you can do is not upgrade your version to the latest. Also, you can take a read of a thread on the WordPress Support forums for a couple of alternatives, including a database edit that you can do - however, that is something you should only do if you know what you are doing - if you make only one wrong move, you can kill your blog!

If you don’t use the plugin, and were intending to - don’t use it. Not surprisingly, old versions are not available for downloading from the WordPress repository, so unless you do have a copy of an old version kicking around, you’re SOL (unless you have connections, and I’m sure some will materialize ).

If you don’t fall into either of those categories, then there are a couple of things you can do - first, and this is something that I don’t usually recommend, but this guy’s antics are beyond unreasonable that he needs to hear the community’s input on the situation, you can leave him a comment on the page for comments, and let him know what you think. Also, feel free to write a post about this; I don’t use the plugin, but hearing the crap that he’s doing spurred me to write this post.

Lastly, if you’re so inclined, use the power of social networking sites to get the word out about these actions.

The big news of the day in the world of blogging is the fact that a Release Candidate of WordPress 2.5 has been released, along with a post mentioning some of the changes to the admin panel that had been shown off in the past. Naturally, there was the stream of “all hail WordPress and their greatest version yet” type posts. Clearly, they’re excited about something.

About what? Well, I’m not sure. The cynic in me says that they’re excited because it’s something NEW! And, it’s from WordPress! That’s got to be the formula for instant success, right? Well, it is if you’re someone who, as a guy who advertises on the radio says, in relation to stocks, ones that are exciting, with things happening all the time to them.

However, there is another type of person - the one that he likes to have work for his company - the one who likes to find consistent performers, and items where you don’t have to change constantly. He admits liking something that a lot of people like - boring and consistent.

Anyway, so how does that relate to the latest news about WordPress? Well, the new version has completely changed everything in the backend of the admin panel, for, as far as I can tell, no discernable reason. Sure, there are the marketing speak things like “interviewing users” and making wide generalizations such as this one, which makes absolutely no sense at all to me -

The WordPress navigation has confounded even sophisticated users.

My response to that is that WordPress has a strange thing called a “learning curve.” If you can’t get the hang of the admin panel after a short amount of time, then I have to wonder if you really are taking the time to understand how it all works. Personally, it took about a week or so of using it to get the hang of where everything was, and then I was set to go. If, as they claim, “sophisiticated users” are having problems with navigation, then I sincerely question the level of their sophisitcation.

Another of the lovely generalizations is this one, from the beginning of the post -

The result is a new way of interacting with WordPress that will remain familiar to seasoned users while improving the experience for everyone.

I’d consider myself a somewhat seasoned user, having been using WP for about 6 months now, and is the new interface familiar? Uh, no. It might say WordPress on the cover, but what’s inside says that this is a product that was designed for beginners.

But there’s more

Apparently, I fall into a minority of people who do not ignore the dashboard. Their solution (as it was for the rest of the admin panel) was to gut the whole thing and make things less user-friendly. For those who aren’t familiar, this is what the WordPress Dashboard looks like currently on my blog -

In my opinion, this current dashboard look is quite simple - you’ve got the links to the things you most likely want to do right at the top - a new post, add a link, and edit your theme. Below that is the Development blog, and to the right is the Recent Activity panel, where you have the latest links to your blog, along with comments and posts, then the Blog Stats section - that’s something that I will come back to shortly, but at the bottom of the page is one of the best features of the dashboard as it is right now.

The links that are grouped under “Other WordPress News” are some of the more interesting links, usually by folks involved in WordPress and their associated projects, but the cool thing is that it’s a way to read some interesting posts written by interesting people. So far, I have not seen this mentioned in the new dashboard.

Now, with the blog stats part of the dashboard. Right now, it’s in a tucked away place, mostly because it’s not something you concern yourself with that much, at least that’s how I’ve become over the last few months - I’m not too concerned about my stats as I used to be. However, the new version of the dashboard puts the blog’s “ego” front and centre with putting the stats (albeit without the number of comments) up at the top. It makes no sense to have it there, and then there’s something right below it that concerns me a lot, especially for new users to WordPress.

The line below it mentions the theme you’re using, along with the number of widgets you have. Next to that is a big old button that says “Change Theme.” I fear that having a button there will make people want to change their themes from day to day, which is something that you don’t want to do if you want to gain an appreciable readership. The current link - “Change your site’s look or theme” is much more subtle, and makes it sound like there is a process that you have to go through to do it. “Change Theme” makes it sound like you can just flip a switch and bam it works. Not good, if you ask me.

Let me just quote one last item from the post -

If you’re jonesing for the old look under your user options you can now select the “classic” colors and get those old blues back.

Now, that’s creative thinking, eh? Let’s change everything around, but you know, if you like the old way, you can have this new way look like the old way. Of course, that won’t change the fact that you’re totally lost as to where everything is supposed to be.

Cause for Concern?

Something that I noticed is that, if you go by the number of trackbacks on the post, only 59 posts link back to that post - quite a few of them aren’t even in English. However, a quick search on Google for blog posts that link results in (as I write this) 284 posts with a link. Now, this great disparity tells me either one of three things - 1. The use of a caching plugin has been insituted to handle the extreme load on the server; 2. There are a lot of trackbacks coming in, and they’re having a hard time handling the moderation task; or 3. They’re manually sifting through the trackbacks to make an editorial comment.

The third one is a result of my noticing that one of the first posts about the new release, Andrew Boyd’s WordPress 2.5: Perhaps I was wrong (posted sometime around 6 AM my time, about 6 hours or so after the original post was made), which had mulitple links back to the original post wasn’t listed amongst the trackbacks. The only ones that are listed there are ones that seem to be neutral (i.e. Mashable) or positive (i.e. BloggingBits).

Some further reading

If you want to read up on what folks are thinking about, there’s always the Aussie Bloggers Forum’s WordPress 2.5 Sneak Peek thread, along with the myriad of links provided by Google’s blog search (hey, Scroogle folks, would it be possible to make a Scroogle blog search? )

Also, if you want to look at what it looks like, you can take the WP 2.5 Demo Site for a test run.

What do you think

Comments are open for this post, so I’d invite you to leave your reaction to the happenings of WP 2.5, and if you are excited about it, for that matter, let me know, and also why you’re excited about the release.