docjohn

The vast, vast majority of people don’t care what’s “better” from a UI perspective or not. What they do care is continuity in their UI. Anybody will learn anything once. But the third time you ask them to learn it in as many years, well, then they start getting more than annoyed — their productivity suffers. The tool that’s supposed to make a simple task easy is getting in their way instead of simply helping them.

I haven’t seen Word 2007. But I have been using Word since 2000 and can tell you that in the past 8 years, their UI has not significantly changed. And as you can tell from the negative feedback about the Word 2007 UI, change stinks for most users (no matter what the intention or rationale behind it). That could be a good argument why Vista wasn’t widely embraced as well — we all know XP, leave us alone and let us get our work done!

I am completely UI agnostic — I don’t care what you put in front of me as long as I can figure out where the stuff is that I need to use. But it’s crazy when I have to think about not upgrading to the latest platform because the amount of re-learning that I and all my users will have to undertake because some set of people think a different UI is “better.”

Thanks… This looks like a very helpful list, so it’s a mystery to me why (a) this isn’t the default link in the admin panel? and (b) why there’s no mention of this important information over at the /extend/themes/ link? It would be very helpful to folks looking for compatible themes.

Thanks again for the link and help.

And frankly, those users would likely have upgraded by now if there was a button on the control panel that said, “Upgrade” and it did that back from version 1.2 or so…. The fact this only started to become a consideration later on in development, long after the cat was out of the bag, so to speak, is not the users’ faults. Rather it’s the fault of a development process that never took into account the complexity of upgrades and all the plugins such a platform encouraged.

Lessons learned. But now I’m suggesting let’s learn from the lessons and start building it into the core of the program.

The process the official WordPress documentation outlines is 13 steps long, including backups of everything (including your entire database), deinstalling plugins, etc. etc. The initial install has 2 steps. 2 < 13. When you have a large site, with lots of entries and lots of plugins, this stuff takes time.

If I could trust the plugins to do this process right, I’d install one. But since WordPress doesn’t trust the plugins enough to include it as a standard part of their package, I’m not sure why I would/should/could trust them (most plugins can’t hose your entire installation like an upgrade plugin might).

I don’t want any more features from future releases. I want rock-solid stability, security, and ease-of-upgrade functionality.

Fixed, thanks for the feedback! I was actually using my own previous creation to post entries, but it was getting too hard to maintain and was standards-compliant with nada….