Ikiru Design

When WordPress 2.5 came out, I was thinking I’d offer a narrative of “how I stopped worrying and learned to love WordPress 2.5.” That ended up being a little dull. Instead, because we’re always told that the internet loves lists — and at this late date it seems unreasonable to offer something more comprehensive — I’ve got a short enumerations of the good and bad.

Good

• A New Look — Though I wouldn’t say that all aesthetic changes made to WordPress redound to the good, I’m satisfied. The new colors are nice, the dashboard’s been improved, and everything feels better.
• Much Better Tag Integration — This is a direct descendant of the above point. Now a list of entries shows the tags. Now we get tag suggestions. And the ability to edit tags as a group. All of these are big improvements over the piecemeal support for tags that felt tagged on to 2.3.
• Better Media Integration — Though I’ve heard — and share — some discontent with the new Flash uploader, it’s nice that it was rethought. The ability to easily upload many pictures, and to easily create galleries are nice changes.
• Crucial or Trivial Bonus: Plays nice with Safari/WebKit — Anyone who tried using Safari with WordPress before will understand what a nice change this is. Anyone who hasn’t tried will think this is a silly point.

Bad

• The Bugs — This may be based solely on the fact that I use custom fields, but I’ve been having terrible trouble with both scheduling posts and the unnecessary creation of extraneous drafts. These sins can be forgiven, but I am getting rather impatient waiting for a fix.
• The New Look — A lot of changes to the Write page are for the better, but the dearth of white space on the right side confounds me. Catergories were there previously, and I think there was a number of good reasons for that. Tags, I think, should go there as well. But neither’s there. As I sidenote: I’m not really a fan of this Lucidia Grande business in the editor either.
• Change is Hard  — This is more a personal problem, but a lot of people (myself included) have been and slow to accept 2.5. This innate resistance to change is both irrational, and a waste of time.

I’m certainly not going back, and am even less likely to change blogging platforms, so all of this is essentially trivial. But now you know.