first i must say i like the design you did, period, looks a lot cleaner, and thanks for the work!
I had liked the write panel a little different though, like many others, i created pages instead of posts a few times. But I guess that takes guetting used to ;-) and will work out for me later.
But the image creating’s become a lot harder and I hope maybe for the next version you’ll bring back the toolpanel from the previous one’s and maybe eliminate a little scrolling with the categories on the right, or left.

cheers,

oliver

But this is just too much. WP 2.5 sucks. Everybody knows that. The long standing cache arrangements or the lack thereof, not to mention the voluminous mysql queries indicate that this is not serious software. The complete disconnect between the founding proprietor and anything to do with UI is another. The discord beween Open Source and the business demands of dot comming is the third. Please do not get me started on html5, xhtml or a whole lot of other stuff. You are in danger of forking the web standards community.

But nevertheless – my very best wishes and good luck.
In my agency I buy your books in volume and issue them to our trainees :)

Moving the categories (and tags, but as Kris points out, they’re optional) below the fold was a staggeringly enormous mistake, so much so that it overshadows all the great things about the UI changes in 2.5.

The RC1 press release said of the Write screen “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”.

Maybe this is true for the new, regular, normal users, whatever you want to call them. But it isn’t true about existing, long-term users, who’s flow has now been disrupted. How is it a good idea to hide things below the fold, that were previously easily findable in the sidebar? For me, the new Write screen is slower to use than its forebear.

On the wp-mailing list, several people expressed concern about the new Write screen during development and expressed a desire to either return to the earlier layout or try something different. Matt Mullenweg responded “…these ideas are not necessarily good or bad, but they’re not backed up by research or usability testing, which the current choices are.”

The results of usability testing are only as good as what you put in: the users you analyse and what you put in front of them. Dismissing valid concerns because they’re not backed up by usability testing means nothing if the testing didn’t test the right people — I believe that the process may have been flawed because HappyCog didn’t have a fully representative group of users. There’s not enough info on the web to be sure of this, so if anyone from HappyCog can give an insight here, I would very much appreciate that, as I’m having a really hard time understanding how they came to some of their revised IA decisions.

If you take a look at WP.com and the responses from people using the free hosted solution, you’ll see that many of them have also complained about the arrangement of the Write screen. I emailed Matt Mullenweg asking about that issue, and he said “We will be trying a few different approaches to things like categories that people seem to be having the most trouble with.”

Doesn’t that rather suggest something is wrong? A six month dev process that created more Write page issues for both novice and experienced users and that the lead developer now says will be looked at again.

I’m sorry to be so critical about this, but it’s so frustrating. WP is a good product, but changes in 2.5 have seriously alienated many WP users — you only need to trawl through Technorati to get some understanding of the scale of the problem, or have a look at the WordPress Feedback forum.

However, the biggest issue is the lack of public commentary on these criticisms. For a company that prides itself on creating software that gives people a voice, it’s ironic and a bit sad that WordPress seem to be more interested in hiding and defending themselves than being open and listening to those voices. Follow these threads to see what I mean:

http://wordpress.org/support/topic/164414
http://wordpress.org/support/topic/169595

There’s a lot of nice new stuff in 2.5, but it almost doesn’t matter because the core function — easily creating blog posts — is now worse. And that’s a shame.

I know it’s not possible to keep all of the people happy all of the time, but I fear for WordPress’s future if it continues along the ‘dumbing down for the masses’ route.

Now, not only are Categories below the fold, they’re below Tags (which are, unlike Categories, optional). I don’t know how many Categories the average WordPress blogger uses, but I’ve got 18 of them, and the chances are pretty decent that my default (regardless of what I set it to) isn’t going to be appropriate for any given post. Having the list in the sidebar (which now contains nothing but whitespace) was simple and intuitive; moving the list below an optional meta-data element is counter-intuitive and complicates 90% of posts I write.

I’m also disappointed with the loss of separate “Save” and “Save and Continue Editing” buttons, not to mention having the “Delete” button right next to</em the “Save” button. I understand that “Save” now functions as the old “Save and Continue Editing” button did, but it makes doing quick edits of published posts a multi-click affair, where previously all I had to do was click “Save” and I was returned to the screen from whence I came.

And just as an aside, it’s all well and good to prove to AG that you can edit comments, but it would have been well and good and truly helpful to let him or her know that you can do so by clicking on the commentor’s name in the individual comment on the Manage Comments screen.