The WordPress 2.7 Admin

Oct 24, 2008 by Matt | Posted in WordPress 8 Comments

WordPress 2.7 will be here soon, the release only weeks away. In addition to long-awaited major features such as automatic core file updates, we’ll be seeing another major redesign on the Admin pages. The goal of the redesign is to improve usability, require less pageloads to get where you want to go, and to offer much more in the way of customization options.

We’ll finally be seeing the beginings of the customizable Dashboard that’s been in the works for some time. Modules will be reorderable by dragging and dropping, and collapsed/expanded at will.

The New 2.7 Dashboard

Screenshots of the new Admin.

It looks pretty good to me. Hopefully the new WordPress release won’t break too many plugins…especially WP125 and GoCodes. ;)

  • http://stevenclark.com.au Steven Clark

    Personally improvements are great. But for someone who has to spend (usually unpaid) time hand holding non-tech NPOs and small business around the admin section they’re going to phone again. Change means confusion for existing non-tech users and so WordPress should probably think carefully about what is a usability improvement or just a break in the established convention.The bottom line with any interface is if it keeps getting changed then it’s not getting more usable at all – except for new users. Or people like us.They need to sit down and nut out the interface they think is going to be right (pretty much anyway) and do that in one hit. This iterative changing of the interfaces is going to be a painful process for my business / client relations. Even this morning I’m explaining things to a struggling non-tech NPO client and I may have to retrain her in the near future. Ouch.It could even affect my moving to something a bit more commercially stable, after being a WordPress guy right from the beginning. Just my 2 cents.

  • http://www.webmaster-source.com Matt

    Steven, you have a good argument there. Even “people like us” like to get used to an interface.

    I’ve tried out the new interface in trunk (and it’s still changing a lot, apparently; it looks different from the screenshots mentioned above now). I think I like the old horizontal navigation better.

  • http://stevenclark.com.au Steven Clark

    I would like to see on what usability research that the WordPress crew have measured their improved usability, and are those measures taken for existing non-tech users, or solely on developers? It’s always dangerous with application development, in my humble opinion, to listen too closely to developers forums and wishlists – an application that starts to do everything really pleases nobody. I’m just hoping this time the sit on a basic interface design and I’ll grit my teeth and write another set of documentation for users / clients and do a whole bunch of hand holding again. It does look nice though, very sexy I agree. :)

  • http://www.webmaster-source.com Matt

    Yeah, it does look nice. It’s a lot more customizable too. I’ve found what I consider to be a usability flaw with it though. With the horizontal navigation of the past, any page you could want to go to is within easy reach. The vertical menu, while allowing more room for additional menus, requires that you scroll down to find the menu you need. And we all know that people are lazy and don’t like scrolling.

    This is especially bad with some plugins that add menus, suh as my own WP125. In WP125, you tend to make extensive use of two submenus added under a new top-level “Ads” menu, the Manage submenu and the Add/Edit submenu. It’s a little annoying to have to scroll down to the Ads menu just to change between them, when in the past the links were right there at the top of the screen. I guess I’ll have to add my own custom navigation to the top of my pages, simply to avoid all the unneccesary scrolling…?

  • http://stevenclark.com.au Steven Clark

    Mmm that doesn’t sound like a very good usability improvement. I confess I haven’t played with it yet and I had a large comment on my site from Jane Wells, from the Ball State University’s Center for Media Design where they did the aforementioned usability improvements and research. It’s a reasonable justification but I just don’t agree with a lot of the reasoning – and strongly doubt some of the research findings which say even people who knew the last interfaces have improved times out of the gate on the new interfaces (which I think I read in that vein). To me that makes little common sense, at least. Maybe I’m wrong, we’ll see. As for this all being about the divided response to the 2.5 changes in March – mmm I don’t think a second interface is going to fix that problem. I’d say it will be even more divided now. It’s a very dangerous way to approach software development and IMO quite arrogant of a software vendor to be thinking no matter what visual trauma is inflicted on the users out there that they are immune to the backlash. I’m tied in to clients on WordPress sites I’ve done to date, but I’m rashly looking around for alternatives. I originally used it because of it’s simplicity.

  • http://www.webmaster-source.com Matt

    The new menu system overall seems all right, but I have a few issues with it in some cases. It’s easy enough to get to commonly used default pages like the Write and Manage pages. However, plugin menus appear at the bottom of the list, and can’t be re-ordered by the end user. Some plugins, like WP-Polls or WP125, are set up so you end-up switching pages frequently, which doesn’t seem as easy to do with the new menus. It could be that I’m just used to the current menu structure, I suppose, but normally extra scrolling isn’t good.

    “It’s a very dangerous way to approach software development and IMO
    quite arrogant of a software vendor to be thinking no matter what
    visual trauma is inflicted on the users out there that they are immune
    to the backlash. I’m tied in to clients on WordPress sites I’ve done to date, but I’m
    rashly looking around for alternatives. I originally used it because of
    it’s simplicity.”

    Maybe it’s time for a fork? A WordPress “client edition” that has a more stable UI, and is designed to be easier to use?

  • http://stevenclark.com.au Steven Clark

    Yes, regardless of Jane’s assertion that usability testing has shown huge improvements, I’m not entirely convinced of that. I think as WordPress puts more and more in there it’s going to have the inevitable impact on end users. Why is Microsoft Word challenging? Because it’s trying to do everything while we only want to write a resume or a letter. It will be very interesting to see how the WordPress crew take criticism of the latest release then, if this is the reaction to 2.5. Another release in January?

  • http://www.webmaster-source.com Matt

    “Why is Microsoft Word challenging? Because it’s trying to do everything while we only want to write a resume or a letter.”

    I don’t know, I use Microsoft Word (well, I use NeoOffice/OpenOffice now…) to write manuscripts to send to publishers (no luck yet, though :D ). For that I need page numbering, double line spacing, margin set-up, and headers and footers that go on every page. Not everyone’s uses are the same. It’s tough to balance the average users’ needs and the advanced users’ needs, I suppose. But it’s something that needs to be done, and done well.