Alternative to WordPress after new Dashboard release?

[RogueOnTheNet]

Anybody else not like the new WordPress Dashboard? I'm jumping ship since it feels like stepping back several years in usability, and so I'm looking for a new CMS.

I just spent a year getting acquainted with the inner workings and even wrote a little code snippet to allow two levels of navigation with pages so I could offer it as a lite CMS solution for clients needing both a website and a blog...and then this latest travesty of an interface comes along.

Not since Typo3 have I used an interface that felt so claustrophobic, unwieldly and shot through with scroll bars, iframes and immovable windows.

Might be a good thing though. I'm taking a look at Joomla again after having not played with it for a couple years. If there are any others jumping off the WordPress ship, I would love to hear what solutions you're considering for a blog platform?

Myself, I'm looking for either blogware that can be used to manage pages (which really, WordPress never did well, hence the need for a hack) and double as a lite CMS...or a CMS that handles blogging really well and doesn't treat it as an afterthought.

Ease of integration for payment gateways (for subscriptions in particular) is a plus.

My field so far is looking like:

Joomla CMS
MODx CMS
Nucleus CMS
b2evolution

I tried fiddling with Drupal several months ago, but there too many bugs with the interface for my tastes.

[felgall]

The reason they changed the Dashboard is to allow everyone to fully customise it so that it looks the way that they want displaying things the way that you want it to display. It should therefore be relatively simple to tell the page to drop all the additional info and display the way the prior Dashboard page did.

[RogueOnTheNet]

The reason they changed the Dashboard is to allow everyone to fully customise it so that it looks the way that they want displaying things the way that you want it to display. It should therefore be relatively simple to tell the page to drop all the additional info and display the way the prior Dashboard page did.

Unfortunately, that doesn't work on WordPress.com, just on individual installations. Thus, they left many non-techie users out in the cold on their free community platform...which is where my blog resides. It's not a commercial blog and was started as an experiment and to try out various strategies, and I get the occasional job from it indirectly (even though it is decidedly not intended as a professional outlet per se).

And really, the only customization I need is the old Dashboard...which the WP team has already said won't be coming back. And since they sort of overdid it on the widgetizing of the interface, it feels claustrophobic. Those widgets which provide information you might actually need are now creating things such as iframes and scroll bars that those on the free platform can't escape.

I personally feel I have invested considerable time and effort in learning to master the platform and even contributing a hack for others to use, but I think they went about upgrading in a rather poor manner. Worst of all was the lack of choice or notification.

The WP team took an approach that is rather like the business practices of those corporations I don't particularly like, so I find myself thinking it's time to simply jump ship. If I'm going to have to invest more time than I already have in the WP platform and can't do anything with my WP.com hosted blog--which, although was an intentional marketing experiment was central to an approach/philosophy I had in mind--there's no sense in my investing time in fiddling with the interface in my hosted sites when it disrupts the intent. (The intent, by the way, was to create a roadmap for those in developing nations to use freely hosted apps to stimulate economic growth and generate income in steps.)

I'm sure it benefits a lot of people, but at some point, it gets tiring learning a CMS and having the development team taking such drastic jumps in direction or interface that it eats up far too much time relearning. That is something impractical for me...and more importantly, for those non-techies who are frightened by acronyms--much less the thought of CSS positioning or PHP code.

[ryanhellyer]

I don't see that changing to another platform is going to help you. You will be back at square one having to learn a new platform either way. At least if you stay with WordPress you will only need to make a new style sheet to change the new design to something you prefer rather than learning everything from scratch.

It sounds like you are planning to host your own sites now anyway, so why not just install your self-hosted version of WordPress?

[RetroNetro]

The dashboard is basically the same with a few changes and it is styled differently but most everything is in the same place (other than settings, plugins and users being off to the right) At least for the WP.org version I have not seen the WP.com version but I am assuming it is the same.

I cannot find the IDs of pages/posts anymore so that is a bit of a pain but has not been a real issue for me yet.

It looks 100% better than it did before (IMO) so I am overall happy with it.

[RogueOnTheNet]

I don't see that changing to another platform is going to help you. You will be back at square one having to learn a new platform either way. At least if you stay with WordPress you will only need to make a new style sheet to change the new design to something you prefer rather than learning everything from scratch.

It sounds like you are planning to host your own sites now anyway, so why not just install your self-hosted version of WordPress?

Oh, you're quite right, I'll be back at square one so to speak. Which is kind of why I might as well go with another solution I think. Again, I think most of the responders are missing the point that the issue is on the WP.com hosted blog community where you can't make changes without paying for a hosted solution. Which, you're right...I can do that myself. Again, there was a specific point to using the free community hosted blog.

I've used dozens of CMS over the years and usually test several every year, so some (such as Joomla, b2evolution, Mambo, Typo3, MODx, Etomite, the various Nukes, and quite a few others) are at least familiar to me. Again...I realize the issue is easy to deal with if all I were doing were hosting my own...I could write a lite blogging app if it came to it. But to spend over a year building visitors and such through the use of the free hosted blog, and to find it suddenly not working right and downright painful to use--that's hisheartening and a bit upsetting. It isn't just appearance, but usability that is an issue.

Mouse movements to select categories for example, in the previous Dashboard required mouse movements of about two inches to scroll, select, and click onto the browser scroll bar--now it requires about five inches of movement between scrolling to select categories and checking a box, and then several more inches over to the browser scroll bar. That's a horrible step backward in usability, and just one of many examples. Again, it might be fine and dandy for self-hosted solutions (and I had a couple of self-hosted WP installs until just recently) but it is not at all an upgrade in usability on the WP.com community blogging platform.

[bdude]

I don't like the new Dashboard layout either, but I am not superficial enough as to dump WordPress simply because of its design. Although you could try Movable Type now that it's open source.

[nation-x]

Honestly, I prefer the new dashboard... I am really liking 2.5 over previous versions.

[Redivider]

Mouse movements to select categories for example, in the previous Dashboard required mouse movements of about two inches to scroll, select, and click onto the browser scroll bar--now it requires about five inches of movement between scrolling to select categories and checking a box, and then several more inches over to the browser scroll bar. That's a horrible step backward in usability, and just one of many examples.

Usability isn't measured in inches. There are so many usability improvements in the new Dashboard I don't even know where to start. It was designed by one of the most respected companies in the design community. I think they know a little bit about usability.

[hrg]

I completely agree - WP 2.5 is a disaster!! Items have been removed or changed in places from where they were as we used to use them for years.

I removed 2.5 and put a 2.3.3 back, i'm satisfied. We have to wait some another six months for Matt to fix bugs and do some interface clean up.

Because that what is now looks like cripple to me

[ryanhellyer]

hrq - What specifically do you not like?

[Dan Grossman]

I like it, especially how they widgetized the dashboard. I just finished building a dashboard widget to show my blog's W3Counter stats.



That was much easier with all the new dashboard widget hooks 2.5 has.

[BlazeMiskulin]

Usability isn't measured in inches. There are so many usability improvements in the new Dashboard I don't even know where to start. It was designed by one of the most respected companies in the design community. I think they know a little bit about usability.

Usability is measured in inches. Because the more inches I have to scroll, the less efficient I am with my work. The new placement of many of the items (especially what used to be in the sidebar on the "write" screen) means I need to scroll up and down rather than just flicking the cursor over to the right.

A lot of the redesign seems to be "putting everything in it's own blue box". Why? Why put things (such as "tags" and "categories") in a box that's 75% of the width of the window when most of that box is empty space?

The Widgets area of the "Design" tab is atrocious. It used to be small, clean, and easy to use. Now it's a hulking monstrosity. And what's with all the fancy slidy stuff? Other people may be impressed that a tab slides out to be a box, then slides back, but I find that to be annoying fluff and a waste of resources. (Yes, I'm a cantankerous old man.)

Yes, they've added lots of new functionality. I don't think anyone is arguing that the new functionality is bad. It's the interface; it's become "pretty" at the expense of simplicity and usability. I go to the admin panel to type words and change settings, not to see bubbly blue boxes dance around on my screen. Almost all of the comments I've seen regarding a dislike of the new interface are saying the same types of things.

I like my interface to be clean, compact, simple, and easily usable. The problem is, now that WP has become so popular, the user-base has shifted away from advanced/geek users who want clean, simple functionality to the "average" user who wants lots of "pretty flashy" stuff.

[TFLNetwork]

I still haven't updated it

[Dan Grossman]

I still haven't updated it

I see you're running 2.3.2. You need to upgrade to at least 2.3.3.

Upgrade or else. I can hack your blog and edit your posts right now.

[felgall]

The title of the thread refers to the new dashboard but the thread now seems to be discussing other parts of the admin ares other than the dashboard page. Shouldn't we be trying to stay on topic by just discussing the new dashboard page and have a separate thread for other aspects of the admin area?

[crazypenguin]

Have you considered Xaraya?

Or Textpattern?

[gtork]

You mentioned using Joomla, for a cms very good, for a blog...functionality is a little lacking.

[Josip Barbaric]

Has anyone used MyBlog, a component of Joomla?

[crhayes]

I like the new Wordpress Dashboard. It's clean and easy to use...and the page/post writing pages are well organized. I think it's much better than WP 2.3 (I think that was the version with the expandable boxes off to the right, rather than underneath?).

[Dan Grossman]

Yes, 2.3.3 had post editing boxes on a sidebar, where 2.5 moved them to underneath. The plugin hooks for adding boxes there were changed quite a bit.

[crhayes]

I just started my site with wordpress, but the main focus of it is going to be more than just a blog, so hopefully I can get WP to act efficiently as the CMS I need it to be. However, I like the way it's set up. Apparently the backend code is sloppy though, and I haven't really tried anything else, so I wonder if I should experiment before settling down with it - lol.

[RogueOnTheNet]

Usability isn't measured in inches. There are so many usability improvements in the new Dashboard I don't even know where to start. It was designed by one of the most respected companies in the design community. I think they know a little bit about usability.

I'm sure they know a little bit about it.

As for usability being measured in inches, I must disagree with you. What makes any UI usable is, well...how usable it is. If it is harder to use than it was before, usability has suffered. The totality of the experience end-users have with a particular UI is what comprises its usability.

Now, overall, yes--there have been improvements to many parts of the platform. However, there have been many small steps backwards as well in my opinion. Simply making more widgets is not an improvement--especially if those widgets make the time spent doing tasks take longer, involve more actions such as more mouse-clicks or keystrokes, etc. In that case, more distance equates to usability suffering, and not all of the new WP 'improvements' come across as such to a lot of people...of which I am just one.

But again, it is still a decent blogging platform, there's no question of that.

[RogueOnTheNet]

Usability is measured in inches. Because the more inches I have to scroll, the less efficient I am with my work. The new placement of many of the items (especially what used to be in the sidebar on the "write" screen) means I need to scroll up and down rather than just flicking the cursor over to the right.

A lot of the redesign seems to be "putting everything in it's own blue box". Why? Why put things (such as "tags" and "categories") in a box that's 75% of the width of the window when most of that box is empty space?

The Widgets area of the "Design" tab is atrocious. It used to be small, clean, and easy to use. Now it's a hulking monstrosity. And what's with all the fancy slidy stuff? Other people may be impressed that a tab slides out to be a box, then slides back, but I find that to be annoying fluff and a waste of resources. (Yes, I'm a cantankerous old man.)

Yes, they've added lots of new functionality. I don't think anyone is arguing that the new functionality is bad. It's the interface; it's become "pretty" at the expense of simplicity and usability. I go to the admin panel to type words and change settings, not to see bubbly blue boxes dance around on my screen. Almost all of the comments I've seen regarding a dislike of the new interface are saying the same types of things.

I like my interface to be clean, compact, simple, and easily usable. The problem is, now that WP has become so popular, the user-base has shifted away from advanced/geek users who want clean, simple functionality to the "average" user who wants lots of "pretty flashy" stuff.

A-effin-men!

Someone who doesn't know a little about usability, but rather, a lot.

I second everything you said.