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December 28, 2005

Wordpress 2.0 - The Good and the Bad

Michael Arrington

50 comments »

We’ve switched TechCrunch over to Wordpress 2.0. Not everyone is interested in the feature set of the Wordpress blogging platform, so I’ll keep this brief.

To see a good overview of the new features, see Asymptomatic.

A big change is the ability to create categories on the fly, from the post page, with Ajax. This was previously a multi step process. Since Technorati and other blog search engines view categories as synonyms to tags, this is a quick way for most users to quickly and easily tag their posts without adding additional code.

Another big improvement is the enhanced “view post preview” function. This shows the post exactly as it will look on the blog, with all formatting and CSS that will be applied. This is a welcome feature.

They’ve also added a wysiwyg rich text editor. I disabled this immediately, although many users will like it.

Now for the bad. The new image uploader is a train wreck. Yes, they’ve moved it to the post page which removes a click. However, what took a couple of steps before now takes five or six because I format images in a very particular way which the uploader doesn’t support. It also has default settings, like thumbnails, that require extra clicks to get This needs to be fixed or I will literally go crazy. At the very least, just showing me the URL string for the uploaded image will get me back some of the functionality lost.

The image URL folder is now reset every month as well, and so I can’t easily find old images, either. They didn’t think through this very well, or at all.

Transition took a few days (yes, days) before comments and images were showing properly (thank you, Bryan, for doing this) The support site provides some help, but the depth of questions and obvious user frustration shows that many, including me, should have tested it out before transitioning our entire blog there.

  • Sphere It

This entry was posted on Wednesday, December 28th, 2005 at 12:04 am and is filed under Company & Product Profiles. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.

Trackbacks/Pings (Trackback URL)

  1. Pig Pen » Blog Archive » WordPress 2.0

    December 28th, 2005 at 1:04 am

  2. WP2.0-RC3 » What’s new in WordPress 2.0?

    December 28th, 2005 at 1:40 am

  3. jB: no - that's definitely not good enough

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  5. BrianShih.com » Things to do, things to do…

    January 5th, 2006 at 1:09 am

  6. wordpress the button » Blog Archive » wordpress the button!

    January 5th, 2006 at 9:17 pm

  7. g i l g a m e s h . c a » Wordpress 2.0: Image Uploading BROKEN

    January 12th, 2006 at 11:44 pm

  8. Because I Write » Blog Editor

    January 17th, 2006 at 7:03 pm

  9. Discount Tools and Hardware » Blog Archive » Testing sending of auto-trackback pings

    January 20th, 2006 at 9:43 am

  10. WordPress 2.0.1 Test Blog » Blog Archive » Retesting the sending of auto-discovery trackbacks using the new WordPress 2.0.1

    February 1st, 2006 at 2:25 pm

  11. WordPress 2.0.1 Test Blog » Blog Archive » Retesting the sending of auto-discovery trackbacks using the new WordPress 2.0.1

    February 1st, 2006 at 2:25 pm

  12. WordPress 2.0.1 Test Blog

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Comments

RSS feed for comments on this post.

  1. Vadim B. Guzev

    December 28th, 2005 at 12:15 am

    Hi,

    Links to Source of the post in your feeds are not working…
    Try this one:
    http://feeds.feedburner.com/Techcrunch?m=505

    Best regards,
    Vadim

  2. nortypig

    December 28th, 2005 at 1:01 am

    I like WordPress but don’t think I’ll upgrade again until the dust has settled a bit and some of this stuff works out. Especially the image issue as I’d find that a bit insane.

    That said I’ve used wordpress happily for over a year and like it immensely. I’m back to plain kubricks temporarily though…

    Thanks for the heads up. Cheers.

  3. knight

    December 28th, 2005 at 1:43 am

    for image, i still think http://fredfred.net/skriker/in.....ge-browser this would better compare to wp2 new image upload way

    any problem on the trackback ?

  4. Britney

    December 28th, 2005 at 2:07 am

    I too feel your pain. I had played around with WP 1.5 and enjoyed it so much I canned my movable type for wordpress. After a relativley simple install I noticed some cool new things, but I should have waited.. 1.5 is great, and 2.0 seems to be so new, it will take a minute to get bugs, feedback, plugins, extensions, and themes, all of which are the reasons 1.5 is so great already..

  5. zeroK

    December 28th, 2005 at 4:51 am

    I’ve recently updated both of my weblogs from WP 1.5.x to 2.0 and quite like it so far. It took my 2 days of cleanroom testing to check all the plugins I’m using, but that was it for me.

    The whole upload featurre looks a little bit rushed to me. If I’m using something like that I expect to get some kind of abstraction. Meaning: When I upload an image using this interface, then the path shouldn’t be stored in an absolute way but more using some kind of path prefix variable so that I can move the uploads folder without having to edit every single post.

    Also not offering the original image path besides the thumbnail path is quite stupid IMO.

  6. Mary-Ann Horley

    December 28th, 2005 at 5:17 am

    I just tried the upload feature for the first time (usually I just use Flickr) and you’re right, someone did that in a hurry. Great idea, but I’m sure it’ll need an upgrade in 2.1.

  7. MV

    December 28th, 2005 at 5:30 am

    The image uploader drives me crazy too… I’d rather use FTP to upload images in a folder I prefer. The image uploader also automatically generates thumbnail which I don’t use. I laugh when the thumbnail file size is bigger than the original.

  8. Alex

    December 28th, 2005 at 5:31 am

    I think I am going to wait to update my blogs with 2.0. I am currently happy with 1.5. The new features in 2.0 sound great however, I think I am going to wait for the bugs to work themselves out. In any case, I am glad to see that you’ve fixed your issues….

  9. Mary-Ann Horley

    December 28th, 2005 at 6:03 am

    Alex, I think you’re right to wait (I didn’t…) 2.0 is mostly an under-the-bonnet update and there’s not really many new features for the user.

  10. Matt

    December 29th, 2005 at 8:46 am

    Sorry you had a rougher upgrade than normal, we’ve gotten a lot of good feedback on the uploading and will be working with it a lot in future releases. Strangely it’s something that’s fairly polarizing, new users (on WP.com) love it but experienced users don’t like the change.

  11. Tris Hussey

    December 29th, 2005 at 10:23 am

    I totally agree about the upload trainwreck. It’s locked out all the editors like Qumana, Ecto, BlogJet, etc.

    There are hacks and work arounds, but …

    On the other side I really like WP 2 and am porting more blogs to it … of course I’m putting plans on hold until the upload issues are fixed.

  12. mark

    December 29th, 2005 at 11:31 am

    I also made the transition. Agreed that some changes in the image department need to be made. I used sticky image and had options on the size of the posted image and the click on image. Just upload with the post and done. The thumbnail is too small to use and the regular image is too big.

    The other problem is the trackback seems to be broken. A few have noted this problem. Here is the link. Find out anything… it would be appreciated.
    http://wordpress.org/support/topic/53669

  13. Eric

    December 30th, 2005 at 4:44 pm

    Hello Michael,

    I’m surprised that someone with your technical savvy isn’t running Textpattern because of its ability to be easily customized. I feel it has so many advantages over several of the content management and weblog software programs out there. I did a lot of research when I first started my weblog to see which program to go with, and I liked this one because of the customizational and organizational abilities (plus it’s free). I’m not the most technologically savvy person (my background is in urban planning), so the learning curve was pretty steep for me at first, but I’ve been impressed with the setup of the content on my site so far using Textpattern.

    You can also easily upload plugins to add to its functionality. On the software support form, dozens of users post their own plugins. Plus, upgrading takes less than five minutes, and I’ve never had a problem transitioning to new releases. You may also be able to import your content from WordPress, I know that you are able to do so with a few other programs.

    At any rate, you can check out my website - http://walkableneighborhoods.com to see how I’ve designed my site using it. Another good source is the Textpattern magazine that lists the top websites created using Textpattern.

    I’m sure you’ve heard all this before and I’ve wasted your and my time, but just in case. I feel it is a great product that deserves recognition in the Web 2.0 world.

    By the way, I love your website and stop by all the time. I hope you continue to keep me updated on advances, I love reading about it. I may consider a career change someday (but never give up on my walkable neighborhoods causes!).

    Eric

  14. Ed Sutherland

    December 31st, 2005 at 8:36 am

    I just converted our iPod Planet to WordPress 2.0 and aside from the fact some older plugins and themes break, I’m impressed.

    One feature I enjoy as a site migrating from one open-source application to another is the ability to import all my old messages via RSS feed. I imported hundred of messages in a matter of seconds.

    Ed

  15. MV

    December 31st, 2005 at 11:15 am

    Want the old school upload feature? Someone had recommended me this plugin. It restore the upload feature and it works great!

    http://www.ilfilosofo.com/blog/old-style-upload

  16. Abdul Aziz

    January 2nd, 2006 at 10:13 am

    Even I’ve disabled the WYSIWYG ajax editor.

  17. johnny

    January 12th, 2006 at 8:09 pm

    hello every body I have created a new blog http://www.gadioc.com and i used wordpress 2.0 for it. Its seems trackback wont work. help me to solve trackback problems

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    February 14th, 2006 at 4:49 pm

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    February 15th, 2006 at 6:33 am

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    February 15th, 2006 at 1:52 pm

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    February 16th, 2006 at 8:46 am

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    March 13th, 2006 at 6:06 pm

    WordPress blogs are of much higher quality but they are harder to find unfortunately. Thanks a lot anyways.

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    May 25th, 2006 at 11:51 pm

    I couldn’t e-mail either!

  29. Liz Waldner

    September 2nd, 2006 at 12:10 am

    I love wordpress..so far..
    http://www.lizwaldner.wordpress.com
    been chattin up on it for 5 months now and enjoy how it works with youtube.

    Cheers,
    Liz Waldner
    Prince George, British Columbia, Canada.

  30. Mike

    September 24th, 2006 at 11:15 pm

    Hey
    Just now updated ur site.Plugin are nice but it difficult to work .Thank u.

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