Fieldnotes on a WordPress 2.7 Development Build
Over the weekend, I decided to finally install a copy of the WordPress trunk — that’s the currently-being-worked-on version for those not familiar with the term. For need of something to write on that new installation, I noted my first impressions of it. It seems relevant to share as the WordPress team is now soliciting advice about its menu structures.
It worth noting that I did this Saturday. Things have changed since. If you’re interested, popularly relevant information about development is at the WordPress Blog. More abbreviated notes, and up-to-the-day changes are tracked here.
Because some of my impressions make little sense without visuals, I’ve included a gallery of the most notable changes that have so far been made in the progress toward 2.7. (Sidenote: first time I’ve used the gallery in WordPress.)
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- The Inbox and Quickpost fields are both new additions to the dashboard.
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- On the write page, you can drag most of the meta boxes around.
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- A view of the main inbox. Again, that’s just dummy text.
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- The Install Plugins page is your jumping off point for, well, installing plugins.
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- This is what a click on “CSS” from among the tag cloud gets you.
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- Clicking Install brings a longer description of it into focus.
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- The dialogue you get once the new plguin his been successfully installed.
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- The upgrade page gives you the option of doing an old-fashioned upgrade or a new one.
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- Much like for plugins, the page marks progress and lets you know if it did or didn’t work.
And now my impressions, as originally noted:
I don’t really like how the new version smashes out the horizontal space. Though I doubt the change is nearly as big as it currently seems to me, it’s undeniable that the compose area fits fewer words per line than did previous (2.6-) versions.
The left side navigation has its pluses and minuses. I like that you can get to any page at all from it, but it’s also there even when you aren’t wanting to go to any page.
I think the term Utilities in the sidebar is misguided. “Manage” seemed to make more sense, and still does.
The built-in browse and install feature for plugins is pretty unquestionably cool.
The built-in upgrade to WordPress itself seemed to have failed on my one and only attempt. (It has since worked for me, the failure may have been a fluke.)
I think the ability to drag anything on the write page the sidebar is good, but it’s not as much customizability as I’d like. Will I ever be able to put a custom field on a post, without having to name that field every time? And be able to put that field right under the title field if I so choose? Until then any changes or not to the Write page will seem rather superficial to me.
There appears to have been few or no changes made to the Themes area thus far.
The dashboard has changed, but right now the utility of the “Inbox” and Quick Post sections, both sitting above the news boxes of 2.5+, are open questions.
Clearly there’s no small amount of work left before 2.7 “ships” in November (by current plans). That said, I’m amazed by all the great features slated for inclusion, and I feel so lucky to blog on such a constantly-improving platform.
Interesting post and great coverage of the coming features.
One thing I will definitely agree with you on is the reduction of horizontal space, especially in the editor. I think the current editor (2.6) is a bit too thin as is. To see that getting even thinner is not something I’m looking forward to.
However, if I’m not mistaken, it looks like it may have gotten taller, which is nice. I would like to see a sort of full-screen view of the editor (or even better, an ‘in-theme’ version of the editor where you can edit almost as your users will see it).
It’ll be interesting to see everything that happens once it gets released. And I agree that it is great to be using such an ever-improving platform.
Actually, the height of the editor is controllable — and has been for some time — from the dashboard settings, you can set it to whatever you’d like.
There’s also the full-screen editor — the window-looking button on the visual editing bar — that’s been here since 2.5. I think that view is often too wide, but it’s certainly there if you want it.
And the concern about horizontal space that I had on the months old build that I was using when I wrote this post have been mostly alleviated. Assuming no huge changes from the Beta 3 I’m currently using, the navigational sidebar is collapsable down to just the icons. In that view, the width is pretty close to what it’s been (though it’s certainly not bigger).
And I feel the need to say that the current state of 2.7 is quite nearly more useful than I thought possible. The Dashboard’s pretty great — choose where you want everything. And little things, like the ability to reply to comments in the admin area, are just icing on the cake of automatic core upgrades and the built-in plugin browser/installer.