On Test Driving New Features

For shits and giggles, I downloaded the WordPress 2.7 Release Candidate.

I was curious, first, what it would look like “under the hood.” I knew they were putting together a new user interface, and I wondered what that looked like. I knew they were planning some new features, and I was curious about those, too.

Well, after much uploading of files, I am running on the 2.7 Release Candidate and…

It’s different.

The new interface I like. I didn’t like the 2.5 interface a whole lot. This new interface is softer on the eyes — lots of blues. And on the Dashboard, the first screen I see when I log into WordPress, it’s been massively rearranged. In fact, I’m writing this post from the Dashboard. I don’t have to click a button for a new post. Instead, there’s a composition box right there.

The “Recent Comments” window I see is more useful; it has excerpts and Gravatars for the five most recent comments, and hovering the mouse pointer above the comment gives me the option to mark as spam, approve, even reply. Things are color-coded, too. Approved stuff is green. Spam stuff is red.

There are drop-down menus everywhere. I see a button, I click a button, and a menu drops down. It’s pretty intuitive.

My complaints are two.

First, WordPress has become massive. The file was 1.7 megabytes. What happened to the lean, mean code machine that was early iterations of the software? It used to be that you could install WordPress in like fifteen minutes. Not anymore. I wonder if the code has grown too big, and I wonder if a smaller, WordPress-Lite product would fill a vital niche, for people who don’t need lots of fancy bells and whistles. The only thing is, I don’t know what I’d cut. *shrug*

The other complaint? Some stuff looks wrong, probably because I’m in Opera. There are a couple of links in the Dashboard that overlap one another. My guess is poor coding; it probably looks fine in IE and Firefox, and those of us using Opera have to suffer. It’s not the first time WordPress has stiffed the Opera user; earlier versions of the software had browser sniffing that wouldn’t serve parts of the Write screen if you were using Opera.

But those are minor things. It’s pretty, and I like it.

And I’m going to need to recode the “Revolution” plugin; it’s a altered version of the standard “Hello Dolly” plugin that comes with WordPress, only I replaced the lyrics of “Hello Dolly” with the Beatles’ “Revolution.” The reason for the recode? The lyric goes someplace it shouldn’t now. But, as the line from the song I’m seeing on the screen right now says, “Don’t you know it’s gonna be alright.” And it will, that it will. 🙂

New toy. Go me!