I love the new WordPress – version 2.7.1. The Dashboard UI was in desperate need of a clean up and the WordPress team did a fantastic job! Placing the navigation on the left-hand side of the page was a huge improvement. It pushes more page elements toward the top of the page and opens up more real estate for post editing. That being said, a change was made to the blog management pages that could (on the surface) make the new version harder to use for the technology challenged.
I maintain a few blogs that have multiple authors of varying technical “know-how.” One of these blogs is Pajamas Media which is built on WPMU. Pajamas has multiple bloggers (called Xpress Bloggers) that contribute content from around the globe. These people are brilliant writers who have many published books amongst them. However, some of them get nervous when we introduce new technology into the mix. Once we train them on a particular system, they tend to be fine until we make a change.
We recently upgraded to WPMU 2.7. All in all, the transition went very smooth – much smoother than any in the past. The new interface was well received and very little training was required. The authors liked the Quickpress feature as well as the Quick Edit feature for managing posts.
However, upon first login they were confused as to how to edit a post or to approve a comment. In the new system, actions like “Edit” and “Approve” are not displayed when you first view these management screens. Once the user moves their cursor into a the box of the post they want to edit, the actions appear. While this was perfectly natural for a coder like me, it was not obvious to them. After explaining how to use this feature, they understood immediately.
If I had not been available to explain this to them, I wonder if they would have found it on their own. I imagine that the decision to hide these features on first glance was driven by the desire to make the interface as clean as possible. And while I understand this reasoning, hiding this UI created an extra training step for me and it will for others.
I created a small plugin that displays the actions by default. You can download it for your own blog here. If you find this useful, let me know. I might take the time to build this out a bit more.
