geoffarnold

I upgraded, posted a rant about the usability of the Write Post screen, and now I find that I’m not alone.

A few weeks ago, I read the “sneak peek” about this page:

By far, the most frequently accessed part of WordPress is the Write screen. It gets the job done, but its myriad options can be overwhelming. The new write screen only displays the information that you’ll use most often. It displays the most common fields in a way that makes posting incredibly easy. Additional options are hidden away until you need them. The new Write screen anticipates the natural flow of the way you write, and is smart enough to remember the way you left it so that your preferred writing environment is always quickly available. The new visual editor even has a handy full-screen mode to help block out distractions while composing your newest post. (My personal favorite new feature.)

And I must admit that I probably “mixed in” these comments about the Dashboard:

You can… edit the way information is presented so that the new Dashboard conforms to the way you use WordPress.

There are two problems that I can see. First, the page doesn’t “display the information that you’ll use most often”, it displays the information that some UI designer (probably not a hard-core blogger) thought you would use most often. If one could actually edit the UI so that it conforms to the way one uses it, that would be great.

The second problem is that the UI is very space-inefficient. Earth to WP: we don’t all compose our blogs on 24 inch iMacs. Many of us use cellphones, or subnotebooks, or even internet tablets. Space matters.

And whatever happened to that full-screen mode anyway?