Wordpress.com Review
So, I recently got my grubby, butter-fingered hands on a Wordpress.com invite, and thought I’d do a review on it (aren’t I spiffy? YESH! YESH I AM! >_<!). For those who don’t know, the best way I can explain Wordpress.com is that it is like Wordpress’ TypePad. I’m also assuming (based on what I’ve been told by others and a posts on Matt Mullenweg’s Wordpress.com site). And with that said, I want to stop gibbering and get on with it ;D .
After logging on, you’re greeted with the new-and-improved admin interface and Dashboard
As you can see, this dashboard is not like the WP 1.5x Dash you normally see. You see in this new dash a design overhaul (much better than the current grayscale-esque styling), and a quick list of links of common points of interest for users. You also have your normal “Recent Posts” and “Recent Comments” listing on the right. It then goes on to list the fastest growing blogs on Wordpress.com, as well as top blogs and the top posts of the day, and the most recent posts on Wordpress.com. Also, replacing the “Get Firefox” button at the bottom is a BrowseHappy button, now that Wordpress has obtained BrowseHappy from WaSP.
After the initial awe and glory of the dashboard fades, you begin to glance around, and wonder at that little feedback tab in the upper right-hand corner of the screen, labelled “Feedback.” So, you shove your mouse into the corner, and click…
…and dear sweet goodness, it’s AJAX sexiness. Now while this “Feedback” feature is obviously meant for beta testing purposes within Wordpress.com, it shows what’s to come once you dig more in-depth, and just how powerful Wordpress is becoming.
Moving on from the Dashboard, we go to the Write tab, which has gotten an overhaul of its own.
The first thing that grabs your attention is absolutely the WYSIWYG editor (turned on by default, but the ability to turn it off is in the Options panel). I am not a fan of WYSIWYG editors, myself, but I must say that this built-in one is quite nice (it has an undo!) — though that may just be the WP fanboy part of me speaking. The really exciting parts (to me), though, are to the right and bottom of the text area.
As seen above, stuff like categories, post password, excerpt, custom fields, trackbacks— they’re all “widgets” (again, AJAX goodness). You can open and close them at your pleasure, drag them into any order you want, and you can create categories on the fly. This eliminates clutter, while being on the bleeding edge and just schweet at the same time. You can also expand and contract the text area by dragging the corner of it up and down, which is neat if you like having a bigger or smaller text area to type in when making entries.
The Manage tab remains largely the same as the current version of Wordpress. However, you will find some differences, such as the fade effect I tried to capture above. Whenever you, say, delete a post, you click “Delete,” then “Ok,” and the post being deleted instantly flares to red than fades to non-existance. It’s quite nice. You also get this effect when you update any of your Options, but rather the “Options saved” box comes up and fades from yellow to it’s normal gray.
Another difference under the Manage tab is the “Referers” sub-menu. It spits out stats, but I’m not going to provide a screenshot because it’s still a bit rough around the edges. It, however, is a welcome addition where stats have been noticably absent, atleast to me.
The Presentation tab, however, has changed quite a bit, even if dumbed down a bit for mass-use in Wordpress.com.
As you can see, the theme’s details is shown side-by-side with a screenshot. This is incredibly helpful for anyone that has a hard time remembering what a certain theme looks like that they have loaded, as well as being just visually nicer than the current Presentation tab in 1.5.2.
I think this preview of WP1.6 (or, some speculate, 2.0) is incredibly nice so far. Don’t get me wrong, however, it’s still a bit rough around the edges, especially some of the newer features, and I still think the organization and looks of the admin. interface could be improved quite a bit. However, judging by the current state of what I just went over, Wordpress is poised to be the best in the market, by far.
But that’s just my 2 cents.
Tom said...
Great, but the backend is still Matt’s job. Sorry, I would love to see the backend done by the Big Noob or something. I’ll start loving wordpress, or any other cms for that matter, once I believe it to be “complete”, “secure”, “fast”, and “flexible” enough for my liking. The security and flexibility part usually bothers me a lot with stuff like Wordpress and Textpattern. Security and speed bothers me a lot with stuff like Mambo, and Drupal. As for completeness, none of the CMS is complete and flexible enough for my liking. But yea, looks spiffy enough to pay attention to it. ;)
September 19, 2005 @ 07:06 PM