WP 5.0 Still not ready for prime time

Folks, I know ya’ll have been working really hard on the current version of WordPress and were really excited to release it as soon as possible but the business decision to drop this in the middle of the Christmas season was a horrible miscalculation on your part. Where to start…

First, your new editing platform is great for those that format a different visual every time they post. Frankly, that’s bad SEO but hey, to each his own. I’m just not one of those folks. I prefer a look and feel that’s consistent every time I post so that my followers know what to expect. Consequently, this new overall design platform is really only useful to me if I was building a new website with a barebones theme (which I’m not).

There are a plethora of missing features in your editing toolbar, which appears to be spread out across multiple sections. Most important to me are the character map, h5 headers, and color options. They’re nowhere to be found. I’m certain there are others but these are the ones I immediately noticed.

When you insert a link and decided you don’t want that link any longer, there’s no way to break it, remove it, back out of it short of overwriting the actual word/phrase being linked.

You can no longer “select all” and “right-click” to copy and paste the post. You have to use the shortcut ctrl + C to achieve that and it takes multiple tries before it actually works.

Despite being connected to social services, they no longer work. So I had to manually go back and post to Facebook, Twitter, Google+ (which may be a Jetpack issue) but nevertheless, it’s on you.

Inserting thumbnails into my post is a chore that shouldn’t have to be. Instead of locating it in the toolbar, you have to go to the + in the left-hand corner to add the image and then it defaults to the full image size because there are no longer options for thumbnail and resizing.

Once inserted, I then have to go to the right-hand side to navigate to the option I want. It will not allow me to insert the thumbnail into the first paragraph or block and automatically defaults to the 2nd paragraph. I tried it multiple times.

Lightbox no longer works; like at all. The embedded thumbnail no longer expands to full size when clicked on.

The entire feel of writing a post feels like I’m boxed in, much like writing this comment. It just feels unnecessary. It took me over 2 hours to create a post that would normally take 30 minutes or less. A lot of that was troubleshooting and trying to accustom myself to the new layout but still.

Overall, I appreciate your efforts to modernize the experience for creating posts but this just wasn’t the time to do it. January would have been a much better time when most folks aren’t worried about content and production to meet the needs of their followers. This release just adds to the overall anxiety of the season.

A better option would have been to add an option to use the default editor so we don’t have to think about it right now. I was warned about this very issue by Yoast SEO, and tried to get my host to hold off on the automatic upgrade to no avail.

I’m fairly certain that my complaints are not the only ones and that others have pointed out other issues as well; All the more reason to have held off on the release.

Regardless, the damage is done and I’ve moved my Year-end posts to January leaving me with only two more for 2018. I hope you take this constructive criticism seriously and at the very least provide the option for using the classic editor going forward for those of us that really don’t have any use for the new editor.

Sincerely and Happy Holidays!

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• This topic was modified 5 years, 11 months ago by Steven Stern (sterndata).