My WordPress Experience

So I’m starting a new blog… I’ve been keeping myself away from WordPress for a while. I currently work on a commercial content management system so I have this elitist view of my own software. However, good developers need to know their competition well, especially if one is to overcome them. Therefore I am becoming rather good friends with WordPress.

I’m starting off with WordPress version 2.8, I’ve used other versions briefly before and I already I can see that 2.8 is a major improvement. The new control panel interface is very slick. The editor region looks far better than the plain TinyMCE skins.

I’ve noticed some usability things here and there, but that’s just getting to know the product.

- Something I’m amazed at is that you have to delve into the PHP code to add in your database details. It’s really not that hard to have an online interface that handles that as the first step when installing the product. It’d take the “famous 5-minute installation” (I’ve never heard about it before) down to 3 or 2 minutes. This is especially true when every other feature of the application makes it so easy to use without knowing PHP.

- When you first login, it prompts you to change your password. So I did and clicked save…. and …. well nothing. It saved, but the message telling me was at the top of the page and WordPress scrolled me back down to the bottom where I clicked the button. Hmmm… If you’re going to scroll me, perhaps implement fixed success messages like Twitter.

- Custom URLs, I like the layout of the interface you have. It would be great if you had the available tokens/placeholders I could use in the URL straight up. Also, I would say /%postname% is a very common URL pattern, it should be listed on the common layouts.

- Theme downloading – I’m grateful for this feature. We’ve had this in our product for some time now. I think we implement it in a cleaner way, something about the WordPress version just doesn’t seem as “nice” as it could be. Not sure what specifically it is…

So far I haven’t done much else. I shall dig around more and see what I can do with it. I’ll post about my experiences — perhaps they’ll bring me some page hits

Update: Just used the download update to 2.8.1 and it worked like a charm. I love it, in fact. Go WordPress!