Geoff Arnold

I just upgraded geoffarnold.com to use WordPress 2.5. The process went pretty smoothly; the only glitch was that the mobileadmin plugin that I was using isn’t 2.5-compatible. I shall have to see if there’s a new version available… hmmm, it looks as if the answer is no.

The most noticeable change with 2.5 is that the administrative UI has been entirely revamped. OK, I agree that it looks more stylish, but I’m pretty disappointed. In particular, the Write Post page (which I’m using to compose this piece) is poorly laid out. Ideally I want the basic elements to be easy to use: the text editor, the Categories panel, and the Save, Preview, and Publish buttons. These are the features that I use every time; other stuff, like the status, tags, posting time, and so forth should go below the fold, out of the way. If there’s space available, give me a bigger edit box, not swatches of colour to tastefully highlight controls that I rarely use.

This seems to be turning into a rant. So be it. Take a look at this gratuitous waste of screen real-estate:

This is the upper left quadrant of the screen in which I’m composing this post. It starts with a grey stripe which only serves to provide a link back to the first admin page, the Dashboard. No, wait, it also lets me log out, visit the WordPress site, or visit my own sub-page in the Users area.

Secondly we have the blog name, and a Visit Site button. People managing multiple blogs might need this; I’d rather banish the Visit Blog link to the grey stripe and lose the big title, with the wasted space next to it.

Then we have the menu/submenu structure. This is fine, except that I don’t see why some menu items are banished to the right side of the screen in small font. It’s a single menu; keep it together.

Next we have Write Post in a big font. I know I’m writing a post: the words Write and Post are helpfully shown in orange just above. Again, a waste of space.

Then we have a header for the Title box, and finally we actually have some content, about a third of the way down the window. For some reason, the title text is about twice as large as the body text. It doesn’t need to be.

Let me show you the full window that I’m working with:

(Click the thumbnail to see the full-size image.) As you can see, the text box in which I compose and edit the actual blog entry is about 30% of the height and 60% of the width of the screen.¹ And this is all wrong!! The point of a Write Post screen is to write. As much real-estate as possible should be given over to this function; the few essential controls should be kept small (but clear); everything else should be swept out of the way.

Fortunately, WordPress is open source, so I’m going to be able to redesign this page the way I think it ought to look.

UPDATE: I guess I’m not the only person who dislikes the new admin UI. My rant is pretty mild compared with some of the comments here in the WP forums.

1. These are the dimensions on my PowerBook, with a 1280×854 screen↩

This entry was posted on Saturday, April 5th, 2008 at 6:09 pm and is filed under Admin.You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.