Making the switch
Despite what I said in my previous post, I’ve gone and updated my WordPress installation to 2.5. The trigger for this was that one of the plug-ins I’d been waiting for (Ozh’s Absolute Comments) has now been updated. I used Fantastico to do the update - so much quicker than downloading the new version and then uploading it to my server (why does FTP take so long?) - and all went smoothly.
Having now used 2.5 in anger, as it were, rather than just on a local install I’ve been able to give it a bit more of a test and to find a bunch of things that I don’t think are really all that good. Let me run you through some of them:
Colour scheme: that new default colour scheme is so wishy-washy. It looks like its been left out in the sun too long. First job I did was to head to Users \ Your Profile and change to the classic colour scheme, which is at least a little better.
Dashboard: this has been improved - a bit more focus on your blog, rather than Wordpress - and is now widgetised. What you don’t get, though, is any way to manage the widgets. You can edit some of them, so that they show you different content, but you can’t turn them on or off. So another plug-in was called for - Dashboard Widget Manager. This is a great little plug-in that lets you control the Dashboard widgets in the same way as you do the widgets on your blog. So I’ve turned off most of the widgets now and have a lovely streamlined Dashboard.
Tags: when I first looked at 2.5, I thought it was great that they’d finally properly integrated tags as well as categories (after so long of WordPress thinking they were interchangeable items). But when you use the online editor to write a post, you don’t get a list of previously defined tags to choose from, so it becomes a little pointless to keep a track of them.
Widgets: this one seems to have been giving some people on Wordpress.com a bit of trouble. Management of widgets has had a major overhaul and, while on the whole it is not too bad (really just a re-designed layout) the one big bugbear with it is that you can only see one sidebar at a time. Fine if your blog only has one sidebar, but a pain if you have two. I quite like the new layout, but would prefer to be able to see both sidebars at the same time like I could with 2.3.
I’m sure there must be some good things about 2.5 that I haven’t come across yet (and there are a couple that I’ve already noticed - better support for Safari when using the Visual Editor and an attempt to offer tag management) and when I find them I’ll you know.
WordPress 2.5 again
For anyone who’s been wanting to upgrade to WordPress 2.5 but have been a little apprehensive about the upgrade process, good news! 2.5 is now available through Fantastico - so upgrading is just a click away. Of course, you should make sure you’ve backed up all your work before going ahead with any upgrade, just in case. Although, if I remember correctly, Fantastico does a back up before loading the new version (please check this for yourself, though; don’t just take my word for it).
If you’re feeling a little more adventurous and feel that you want to tackle the upgrade process manually, check out the WordPress Upgrade instructions. Again, make sure you’ve got a working back up before you start, and read the instructions twice. But it’s not really that difficult.
While we’re talking about 2.5, it seems that the multi-user installation over at WordPress.com has been upgraded to the new version - but not without some teething problems on behalf of the users it would seem. Since moving over to self-hosted, I haven’t spent any time at WordPress.com but from what I understand the upgrade was done over a weekend and without warning; possibly not the best way to do it. It seems that the new look dashboard is not winning a great deal of friends either.
I’ve yet to move The New Wolfs Howl over to 2.5 (still waiting on a couple of plug-ins to be updated) but from the playing about I’ve done on the local installation I’m still not sure about it. And with version 2.5.1 due to be released in the first week of May (with fixes for the bugs that were known about but not fixed when 2.5 was released), I’m thinking I’ll wait a while.
Another Safari issue solved
If, like me, you get annoyed that Safari opens links in a new window rather than a new tab (regardless of what you’ve got in your preference settings), then help is at hand. Dennis Stevense has this post which tells you how - with a simple Terminal command - you can enable single-window mode.
All you need to do is close Safari, open Terminal, enter Dennis’ code, hit enter. When you re-start Safari, all links that would normally open in a new window (target=”_blank”, for example) will instead open in a new tab. All other links will behave as they would normally.
I’ve tried this one out and it works without any issues at all.
WordPress 2.5
The latest incarnation of WordPress got a step closer to general availability today, with the unveiling of Release Candidate 1. Being the “must have the latest”-type, I downloaded it as soon as I heard about it.
With a little bit of forward planning, though, I have not loaded it on to this site but have installed it locally using MAMP; this means I can run it (pretty much) as it if was on a remote web server but have it on my machine here. That way, when it all goes wrong, the real Wolfs Howl doesn’t suffer.
I had a previous installation of WordPress on my local machine, but I deleted that and started from scratch, just to see what happened. Once the files were copied across, the install process was the usual simple process. Once logged in, you’re immediately hit by the visual differences (which some people are going to love, others will hate, and I’m undecided about) but what are the differences from a usability point of view?
Well, the first thing to notice is that tags now seem to be fully integrated into the system. For a long time, categories and tags were synonymous as far as WordPress were concerned. When they wised up and realised that isn’t the case, they introduced limited support (you could create them, but you couldn’t catalogue them) and now tag support comes of age. You can now interact with your tags the same way you do your categories.
The next thing which is fairly major if you’re a Safari user is that the Visual Editor seems to work - no more stripping out line breaks! This won’t be any benefit to all you IE and Firefox users, but for Safari users it’s a compelling reason to upgrade. (At least, it works with Safari 3.1 which has just been released).
There seems to have been a general “tidying up” of the admin area, with more separation between various parts but I’m not sure how successful this has been. It’s not illogical (or at least no more illogical than before), but it could still be better. One of those things, I guess, that you get used to. Most pages, too, are now laid out slightly differently, but with the same functionality in evidence and nothing really ground-breakingly new. The Dashboard screen is better organised and puts more of your content at the top - rather than marginalising it and taking up all the space with news about WordPress as the previous version did.
On the “Manage Posts” screen, you no longer see the post ID - which may be important to you or it may not - and there’s no longer an obvious “edit” button. To edit a post, you click its title. Not difficult to figure out, perhaps, but I wonder why the edit button had to disappear? What you do get, though, on this screen is the added information of which tags the post uses.
Of course, being new, not all of the plug-ins I favour are working yet; Defensio is (and I assume that Akismet will be too, if you must insist on using that), but a number of others that I like are not yet 100% functional. This is to be expected, as the plug-in authors will not have had much of a chance to update their work, and from what I’ve read elsewhere while most of the visible changes to WordPress seem to be purely cosmetic, there has been a lot of work under the bonnet which has fundamentally changed the way some things work - and it has broken plug-ins along the way.
Overall, I’m still undecided. I need to find out more about what’s gone on under the bonnet to know if this latest release is really worthwhile. There’s a couple of things I immediately like, but that’s more because they’re bug fixes rather than new features. Once updated versions of all the plug-ins I use are available, I’ll try loading WordPress 2.5 on a live server and really start working with it, but until then I’m sticking with 2.3.
BBC goes Fisher Price
The BBC website is one of the stalwarts of the Net for me; its been my homepage for absolutely ages because of its easy access to news, sport, TV and the myriad other things that the BBC has to offer.
Today, they’ve relaunched the homepage of the site. Apparently its been in beta development for quite some time and this final version is the result of lots of testing and tweaking. As you’ll see from the comments left on the blog announcing the change, it is not universally loved.
For myself, I’m not a fan so far. It may grow on me over time, but at the moment it very much seems a backward step; while the various modules can be turned on and off - so theoretically allowing you to create “your” BBC page - the design overwhelms the content and you’re left having to search for what you want. Yes, technically it’s very good (someone must be very proud of their coding skills) but it is not as usable as the old style homepage.
And it’s only the homepage that has been changed so far, which means that the rest of the site maintains the look it had before. It seems a little pointless just to be changing one page and not the rest but perhaps that’s a blessing in disguise; it will give the BBC a chance to re-think the new look and, even if they don’t go back to the old version, at least improve it considerably before it’s rolled out across the whole site.
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