B is for Blogging Platform
By AndrewBoyd • Apr 26th, 2008 • Category: Blogging tips, Current FeatureFollowing on from A is for Akismet, I thought I would look at blogging platforms.
I wrote a rough guide to different blogging platforms in Get a real blog: Finding the right blogging platform - things have changed a little since November 2007.
This article contains some of the changes to existing platforms and also covers some emerging options.
WordPress
In November I wrote the following:
I like WordPress - because it is what I am used to. WordPress uses the the PHP scripting language and MySQL database - both of which I have used for years at work and at play. WordPress has a lot of plugins, some of which are really really good (and some that don’t work at all or get in one another’s way).
Sadly, I cannot say that I like WordPress any longer - there are a lot of issues with WordPress 2.5, security bugs in the earlier unsupported versions, perceptions of arrogance on the part of the Automattic team, and disquiet in the developer community around the zero-negative-comment policy from Matt Mullenweg.
People are wondering where the platform is going. For now, I cannot recommend WordPress to newcomers as a sustainable blogging solution. For the rest of us, we are currently playing an uneasy waiting game to see if the WordPress development community can provide something better or learning how to live with version 2.5.
Movable Type
In November I wrote the following:
Movable Type is popular - I’ve used it myself, but gave it up because I found it easier to do what I wanted in WordPress. Donna uses Movable Type as do several other famous bloggers - and some heavy-traffic sites like Boing Boing and Treehugger. You can run multiple blogs from the one control panel, which is handy, and Movable Type has a personal edition that is free. There are also Enterprise and Community editions (and the Community edition contains some of the same functionality available right now as promised in the future with WordPress MU with BuddyPress).
Donna no longer uses Movable Type for her own personal blog - WordPress was an easier option (this was before the version 2.5 fiasco).
Movable Type has some issues that prevent it being the best it can possibly be - but at the moment it is probably worth considering as an alternative to WordPress.
Blogger on your own hosting
Blogger (blogname.blogspot.com) is still an option - and you can run it on your own domain/hosting (blogname.com) - it is still not as configurable as WordPress or Movable Type.
Drupal and other community CMS
Drupal, Plone, and Joomla are still a good option for a community content management system. They are, sadly, still too much like hard work if you want to go beyond the most basic configuration options (which includes fully replacing WordPress functionality).
Quick BlogCast
Quick BlogCast is still a cheap hosting add-on to some domain reselling packages. It is worth considering if you need a blog in a hurry on your own domain name and don’t want to mess with things too much.
Majestic
Majestic, from Injader, is emerging as a serious contender to replace WordPress for many people. The feature list includes many things (like automatic thumbnailing and easy log access) that are only available to WordPress users via plugins. Majestic has a free and a full-function version, and is a project by Aussie Ben Barden.
I’m playing with Majestic myself at the moment. If it works out, I will probably be cutting all my blogs over to it.
Symphony
Symphony (from 21 degrees) is also Australian, and while it is not Open Source, it is free. I haven’t personally installed and used it yet, it does have some fans out there. If anyone has used it please leave a comment and let me know what you thought.
Conclusion
The only conclusion I can come to at the moment is to be careful out there - the last couple of months since WordPress 2.5 Alpha came out have been a confusing time for those of us (like me) who were happy to recommend WordPress as THE viable option - the world has changed.
In time a viable alternative to WordPress may appear - like I said above, I have hopes for Majestic. In the mean while, all I can suggest is that you learn as much as you can and keep your eyes peeled.
AndrewBoyd is a consultant by day and blogger by night. He loves good food, good wine, and discussing faceted classification schemes with friends.
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Hi Andrew
Interesting rundown on the platforms - I would certainly like to know more about majestic. At present I run WP - still on a 2.3 for my main site.
I am also running drupal on my just4families site and currently have a love/hate relationship with it. I really like the fact that everything is ‘live’ while you are working on the site, writing a post or updating the sidebars. Almost wYSIWYG unlike WP where you enter the admin area and have no idea of what affect you are having until you check the page (one trick is to have the page open in one tab and refresh everytime - still a pain) - Drupal has problems when it comes to SEO and addon modules (plugins)
WP like most organisations is still trying to be all things to all people - time it stuck to what it did best - a good blog platform - plugins can do the rest if required.
cheers
les
Lots of people were perfectly happy with 2.5, here’s an example:
http://redsultana.com/2008/04/01/wordpress-25-dont-be-scared/
Even though we tested it widely, there were platform issues that weren’t reported in the beta/release candidate cycle, but I believe the vast majority of these are fixed in 2.5.1. It sucks, but it happens, and the community has been great about triaging the bugs and getting the fixes into the new release.
We certainly don’t have a no-negative-comments policy, as any browsing of our blogs, forums, or mailing lists would demonstrate. I think some of the frustrations around the forums have been because some people have been downright abusive to the volunteers there, taking their frustrations with free software out on the wrong people. (They should be mad at the developers, not the support volunteers!)
We’ve seen the same sort of reactions in the past, with 1.5 when we introduced themes, with 2.0 when we introduced the WYSIWYG… almost every release of WP has had a controversial change that caused a vocal group of people to be angry about it. Some may certainly leave, but most of their concerns are addressed by updates to the software. We’ve never claimed every release is perfect, just that we’re responsive.
Hi Les,
thank you for your comment.
For more information on Majestic, see http://injader.com or send a message to Ben Barden via the Aussie Bloggers Forum.
I’ve used Drupal on and off for years myself, and I’d have to say that the learning curve is still fairly steep, even for release 6.
I’m on record for not being happy with the user interface changes to WP 2.5 - I was a big fan - time will tell if someone can come up with an admin theme that makes more sense.
Best regards, Andrew
Hi Matt,
thank you for your comment.
Let me start by saying that I was, until release 2.5 Alpha, a total advocate for WordPress. I loved it, promoted it, installed it for a lot of friends, and wrote a lot about its superiority as a blogging platform.
This changed.
All I could find in the way of bug reporting was the forums, and all I got on the forums was abuse. This has coloured my experience of WordPress as a user.
If your email address is not easily findable then it is not usable - and this is the same advice that I would give to a government client in your situation - if you truly want to be seen to be responsive, put a contact widget into every page of every product that you release, and make it easily visible. Respond to every valid comment, and you will be truly responsive. Have a virtual call centre for people to filter the comments/emails for you so that the plugin problems are sent to the plugin authors, and only real bugs go to the developers - I’ll put my money where my mouth is and volunteer to be part of the manual filtering team.
Being responsive also means moving beyond the “unless you ask me nicely I am not going to listen to you” attitude - I know that WP is mostly a volunteer effort, and that people feel strongly about it, but to the average person you are supplying them with something that they need to get through their day - as harsh as it might seem, in their eyes, you are not doing them a favour by supplying them with something for free. It needs to be a mutually beneficial arrangement. I grant that this is not fair, but that is the customer expectation that you are dealing with. Most people who use WP are not coders, they have never sweated blood to ship a product, and they will never understand that you are not there to help them.
Fixing the bugs is one thing, and I applaud you and the team for getting 2.5.1 out so swiftly. The UI problems in the admin interface are another thing entirely. I’ve previously corresponded with and held the Happy Cog crew (well, Jeffrey and Liz anyhow) in the highest regard - Liz is a friend of my girlfriend so I am not going to attack them lightly - but without seeing the design rationale I cannot understand their conclusions let alone support them. Jeffrey’s announcement on his blog has just become a battleground between web standards advocates - without asking him, I am guessing that this has cheapened his feelings of happiness over the implementation of his design.
Will an admin theme that requires fewer keystrokes/clicks/scrolling for common operations be made available?
Best regards, Andrew
Thanks for your comprehensive response!
2.5 was the best-faith effort of both the HC team who did many months of research and design iteration and myself and the WP team doing our best to implement their vision. Some things you refer to are clearly bugs, for example if the new uploader breaks under a certain server configuration, and those have or will be fixed as soon as possible.
Other things people have taken issue with, for example the new placement of the category and tag interface, were deliberate. Because of the feedback those assumptions are being reexamined for 2.6, but I don’t think introducing a theme or option is the best solution, it’d be better to find something that works well by default. The good news is we ship a major version of WordPress 3 times a year, so we’re not that far away from a version which is able to make major changes to the interface just like 2.5 did, hopefully for the better for folks like yourself.
In the meantime, there are plugins that change the behaviour and UI you describe. We’re also watching the popularity of those plugins as a proxy to see how much of the community is finding this to be a major issue.
My contact info is very public, feel free to drop me a line anytime:
http://ma.tt/contact/
http://matt.wordpress.com/contact-me/
I’m sure Liz would love to talk to you as well about your concerns and opinions on the new UI.
I am in agreement with Andrew. The most frustrating thing about the release of 2.5 wasn’t even the problems with usability of the Write screen. It was the extreme difficulty in getting heard.
There are numerous ways to get on touch with Wordpress, or so it seems. Matt’s own contact page, the wordpress.com blog, the wordpress.org forums, mailing lists, trac, etc. Yet even with these avenues open to us, it seems to be an entirely hit and miss affair on whether a response will be given to a customer complaint. Matt, it’s great that you advertise how to get hold of you, but as Andrew says, it means nothing if you don’t respond to people. I emailed you about the problems with the Feedback forum and I’m still waiting for a response.
On another note, Matt’s comments above about the feedback forum do rather ignore several aspects of the discussions that took place. A moderator was rude, arrogant and condescending to many users who were making constructive criticisms about problems in 2.5. Eventually, he stated that we were wasting our breath because developers don’t read the feedback forum, despite it being clearly labelled “Feature requests; criticisms”. It’s simply not good enough to offer this avenue for feedback and then expect people to be happy about it when a volunteer moderator tells them it’s useless. Yes, he did point people to more technical feedback avenues which was great, but many of these are intimidating to average users.
The ‘feedback house’ needs to be got in order and this can’t be done with a disparate team of volunteers who’s own personal views get in the way of the Wordpress message of responsiveness and commitment. It really seems to be a case of the right hand not knowing what the left is doing and eventually will cause bigger problems with users jumping ship, disgruntled that they are not being heard or taken seriously.
So, to help with this, I too would be happy to be part of any ‘feedback filtering’ system that might put an end to the problems we (the users) have been experiencing recently.
You pointed out above that users were unfair to criticise FREE software. Andrew notes that this is a real issue. It seems there is a general air of “the software is free, you (users) should be grateful to get anything at all, let alone our time in responding to your gripes” — and not just from Wordpress, but many other open-source projects. This has got to change.
The user base for Wordpress is huge and people are going to have issues with it. As Andrew says, if you don’t recognise this and only deal with people who say nice things (or offer code solutions), you’re missing a huge piece of the puzzle and will eventually lose a large market share as they leave to find a community where they do feel listened to and taken seriously.
I used to love the Wordpress platform, but at the moment I’m less than encouraged and extremely doubtful about its future. I’m only one person and if I leave to find something else, I’m sure you won’t miss me. But how many others will do the same?
The sound of drums is getting louder Matt and if you don’t put your ear to the ground you’ll be the last man left surveying a bloody battlefield and wondering where it all went wrong.
Hi Matthew,
thank you for your comment. It is a pity that I don’t randomly award prizes for the best comment - yours would be well in the running for their clarity and in moving the argument forward
I think that when you get right down to it, the perceived needs for responsiveness are still not being met by the reality. I agree entirely that Otto’s snarkiness was probably a major trigger for the current rantstorm around release 2.5. Social computing does have a social responsibility to be responsive - to be fair, this is hard to control within a large body of volunteers - but as Steve Collins wrote, “The negative experience you’ve had with WordPress 2.5 both in terms of the software and the hostile community when you tried to raise issues are things that Matt should be addressing personally. He should be handing out penalty time to the aggressive responders in the dev community - reducing their standing and putting filters against their contributions to the code base so they have to re-establish their standing. He should also be strictly setting rules for community interaction - a tightly defined minimum behavior standard, testing quality - in depth and breadth, and time for responses to issues.” I can’t see this happening but I agree with Steve that it would go a long way toward reestablishing the lost trust.
Thank you for volunteering to be part of the feedback filtering mechanism - I’ve pitched one potential solution to Matt M. privately via email and if it looks like a possibility I will be in touch to get your views on how best to make it work.
Best regards, Andrew
The changes in 2.5 were in direct response to people’s feedback about the Write page and Dashboard.The changes we’re making in 2.6 will be as a result of the feedback given here and many other places. I’m sorry if I missed your email, but I do read everything (I’ve read every English pingback to the 2.5 announcement post, for example) and it has a huge influence on the direction of development, just as the ideas forum has been the driving force behind every release since it was created.
If you had a bad experience in the forums, the best thing to do is be a positive force there and set a good example. In fact it would be a great place to start exactly what several people have already volunteered for, triaging major issues to developers.
Also, please email me the threads that you think showed irresponsible moderator behaviour and I’ll review them.
I am changing the comment topic here as I have not yet changed over to Wordpress 2.5. Any new system is bound to have initial bugs and I wanted to wait to make sure things were running smoothly
I wanted some advice about a platform to use for an Australian charity site I am about to build. There will be static pages and a page for each state to add their own events, newsletters and news. Having used Joomla for a few sites and trying out Drupal I know I need something simpler so the client and the state people can do the updates themselves once I have the site up and running.
Would you recommend Wordpress multi user or Movable type? Only the person at the central organization will have access to editing the main site and the states will only have access to their own page or pages. I have downloaded Majestic and will give that a tryout.
Sue,
it may be that Movable Type would serve, especially with the constraint about individual state/territory representatives only being allowed to change their own page(s).
I might ask Ben to comment on Majestic as a multi-user/multi-subsite CMS.
I know that WordPress 2.5 would probably also serve, so long as you worked out the security stuff such that (for example) the QLD account only changed the QLD page. I believe that there are plugins that take care of this but I would not like to guarantee them as a viable option without trying them myself.
Best regards, Andrew
Matt,
I will email the threads concerned. With this being a perceived issue by many people, do you mind me publishing your email address here so that others can contribute also?
Best regards, Andrew
Thanks for the praise Andrew.
Sue, I replied to your email. Majestic allows you to have the same permissions across your entire site, or different permissions for each area. If you want to allow different users to create content in different areas only, then that’s definitely doable with our permissions.
Sure, my email is m at mullenweg dot com.
Ben,
you are welcome - it comes with the fervent hope that you will continue to improve Majestic so that all blog CMS vendors are kept honest - healthy competition is often the best regulation
Best regards, Andrew
Matt,
thank you for providing your email address. Putting your money where your mouth is on contactability is an applaudable move - I know that you intend to be approachable and this shows that you actually are.
Best regards, Andrew
Thanks for your help Andrew and Ben. I am going to install Majestic on my local server to give it a try and will also look into what may be required in the way of plugins to persuade Wordpress to do what I want with it. I have seen some excellent community sites created with Wordpress so it may be possible to do what I want.
This is a non paying job for a non-profit org and although I am happy to do it I cannot let it take up too much of my time once it is up and running. Majestic sounds as if it will be simpler and quicker to set up because of inbuilt features.
Sorry Matt, I am a Wordpress fan really
Matthew Hill and I have been discussing WordPress 2.5 (specifically the admininstrator interface changes) on my blog for the past week or so and he linked to this post yesterday afternoon. I’m glad to see the dialog continuing in places other than my blog, which is typically frequented only by my friends (several of whom use WordPress) and family (none of whom do).
Matt Mullenweg, I’m glad to see your responses on these issues and I do hope that the forum threads Andrew provides are at least a little eye-opening. Despite the fact that WordPress has powered my blog for more than two years, I didn’t create an account at the support forums until after the release of WordPress 2.5 and I felt I should cast my vote in favor of changing (at the very least) the Write Post interface to make it more usable. Unfortunately, the more I read the forums, the less they seemed like a viable avenue for feedback. I hope this is addressed in the near future.
Andrew (again), thank you for the list of WordPress alternatives. I’m certainly not going to switch without giving Mr. Mullenweg and his team an opportunity to properly address the issues, but it’s nice to have an idea of just what my options are.
Hi Kris,
thank you for your comment.
I’m hoping that WordPress can become something I feel safe recommending to friends again.
I hope that the feedback mechanism improves also - it is vital that everyone feels valued (coder, support forum volunteer, and end user alike).
I am currently experimenting with some of the alternatives, if only so that I personally can make the jump if things don’t change for the better. Whatever happens, I think it is good for all of us to talk about it.
I might add a plug here for ethnological/immersive research - if anyone is interested in how ordinary first-time users of WordPress are taking the change to version 2.5, they could do worse than check out the Aussie Bloggers Forum.
Best regards, Andrew
If only Wordpress were as good at responding as Liz Danzico. I’m finally happy to have found someone who can take criticism on the chin AND engage in a meaningful discourse about it.
@Matt M: I emailed you the relevant forum links re: moderator behaviour in my email dated 21/04/2008, but I’ll email it again. Cheers.
Liz is who we’ve been working with the whole time.
I run blogs for a variety of people and they all use Wordpress.
Luckily I installed 2.5 on a “bare bones” blog and after seeing the horrific admin area, every single blog owner decided to stay with 2.3.3.
That’s 16 blogs right there.
That ought to tell you something. The USERS don’t like the interface changes. The devs might, but well… if you lose your users… what do you have left?
The biggest complaint people had was the placement of categories / slugs etc, and the loss of the drag and drop widget area. The widget UI is a massive step in the wrong direction in the eyes of anyone I talked to btw. While people said they *may* put up with having to scroll for categories etc, and there are some css changes available to fix that… the WIDGETS can no longer be dragged and dropped and removing one deletes it.
It’s something my blog owners unanimously agreed on. Drag and drop needs to come back.
I am going to check out Majestic btw - because after reading various threads (I’m sure it’s the same ones referred to here) I no longer feel comfortable with Wordpress and I absolutely feel let down by the tone of the moderators who sound condescending and confrontational.
A post about the admin UI which is in the “Requests and Feedback” area was shot down for “Being in the wrong place”.
Pardon me, but if you don’t want people to post feedback and requests for changes — and if no one reads this stuff — then why have that forum area at all? And why do the moderators feel it justified to take members to task who dare post criticism? Not to mention that those same members were told to “stop complaining” and “saying you want categories back where they used to be isn’t constructive” — only to completely contradict themselves a few posts further down the line.
I found it appalling. I didn’t post, because likely anything I’d say would be deemed a “complaint” rather than a criticism — even though the description of the forum says “– Feature requests; criticism.”
Nowhere is there a CLEAR area designated or listed of where to post such “feature requests” and anything people point to is being shot down as “the wrong place”.
Which begs the question — what DO the developers read? Where should users post their feedback?
In my view, 2.5’s admin interface was a mistake that needs to be addressed a lot sooner than 2.6. If you hang around until 2.6 is out (whenever that might be) then you will likely lose a lot of current users who are disappointed with 2.5 to other blogging platforms.
As I said… I will check out Majestic. If it does what I want it to do, I envision the 16 other blogs going onto it as well if it’s nice to use. Especially since I’m quite certain that there will be no 2.3.3 patches anymore, or any support for it.
I don’t think people will be changing their blogging platform again once they move away from Wordpress. And if they change from WP to something else, get disheartened with it, I doubt they’ll return. In all likelyhood they’d move to yet another platform before considering WP again.
Dangerous tides, to be sure.
Hi Silke,
thank you for your comment.
I can’t disagree with anything you say about 2.5:
- the widget UI is nowhere near as easy as it once was
- category/slug placement doesn’t make sense
- there is a justified perception of the WP forums as a toothless tiger where unhelpful volunteers have alienated a lot of people
- people are looking at alternatives.
On the plus side, we know that at least some people from WordPress are listening to our pain. It is up to them now to decide what to do about it.
Best regards, Andrew
Silke, many of the thing you refer to will also be changing in 2.6. We change the interface with every release, historically people have stuck with us through it (sometimes good and bad) and their feedback is what drives the improvements, much as it did with 2.5.
Around widgets I think there is some confusion - there is still drag and drop. There were some bugs in IE and such that were fixed in 2.5.1. One thing we are looking to improve, though, is the experience of moving widgets between sidebars.
The Requests and Feedback forum is, indeed, the proper place for feedback or criticism. Developers do read it, as well as blogs, comment threads like this, and the numerous direct emails we get. One of the threads sent to me earlier had posts from several core developers, they’re just marked as “Member” by the forum system so you might not know.
@Matt M: If that’s the case about the Feedback forum, then please speak to your moderators, especially Otto42 who made it quite clear we were wasting our time by posting there and that we should instead be on the mailing lists or Trac. Just a few comments from him alone caused a huge amount of dismay, disappointment, resentment and confusion among the users there and it’s simply not good enough.
You *really* need to get this in order. I honestly don’t think you remotely understand how pissed off the users are.
Mr Hill, I’m sorry you had a bad experience in the forums. There are tens of thousands of posts there every week, the majority of which come from volunteers, and most of the feedback I get (particularly about Otto) is positive, so I think your experience was atypical. You’ve already emailed me the link to the thread you think is out of line and I’ve read through the whole thing, and you’ve had extensive replies from Liz on her blog — give us a little time to get the next release out and iterate based on the feedback. We’re not superhuman and we’re trying to serve a huge and often disparate audience. (Since this thread started there have been 170,000 downloads of 2.5.)
I came to Wordpress as a beginner, having moved over from Expression Engine for health reasons. Because of eye problems I have, I wanted a “publishing platform” that was easily skinnable and allowed me to do more daunting tasks in a more time-efficient manner so I wouldn’t have to stare at a screen for hours on end.
As it turns out now, Wordpress is not only worsening my health issues, it has also taken away so many hours from my busy schedule that all the fun has been taken out of blogging for now. It’s also been an extremely frustrating experience on the “support forums”. Free or not, the condescending manner in which a few individuals treat newcomers or normal users looking for help is astonishing. I can understand that lending a supportive hand can at times be highly frustrating, especially if many new users seem clueless at first, but what’s going on over there is beyond anything I feel like participating in.
What stumps me is that the update to 2.5.1 broke even more (I had the image uploader 80% there … now I’m back to zero), including my feed which validates … but is empty (no wonder it validates).
I always thought a “publishing platform” would allow one to at least upload an image or run a feed, but these most basic functions aren’t working for some/many people (anymore). The replies we hear are that we are the culprits. I don’t know how many tens of thousands of hours were lost by people going through the same fixes again and again, deleting and upgrading, exporting, wiping databases clean, reinstalling, reducing their blogs to the most minimal installations … only to hear when it didn’t work the fourth, fifth or sixth time that we were just too dumb.
I refuse to believe that the testing of WP 2.5 was extensive enough. Maybe I’m also wrong and there are too many bugs in the first place? All I know is that the past platforms I used (EE and pMachine) or tried (Textpattern) did not have even a small percentage of these issues.
I just hope Wordpress can get a grip on these issues to allow me to publish on my site until I have time to switch platform (again) in the summer.
Having switched to Wordpress at the end of 2.3’s existence was a joy (not a single issue worth mentioning, really) and has been nothing but a nightmare since.
Having switched to Wordpress was the biggest mistake I ever made since I started blogging in the middle 90s.
Sorry, Matt, but I’ve never experienced anything like this, not even with Microsoft.
P.S.: I agree with most negative statements here about the interface. I was amazed to see some things implemented that clearly go against usability standards upheld by some of those who participated in the redesign (A flash uploader is now the epitome of usability? Let me consult my books here again … no, doesn’t say anywhere.). Mind-boggling, really, but something I could easily live with if I could actually use Wordpress right now. Alas, that’s not the case.
@Matt M: I wait with bated breath to see the improvements in 2.6.
Hi all,
thank you for choosing my blog as the place to have this conversation amongst the many discussing the WP2.5 changes at the moment. I feel privileged to be part of it
Matt M: like Matthew H, I think it was probably Otto that put me off using the forums because he didn’t acknowledge that there was a problem. One person in an official position can ruin the feedback loop for a lot of people - it will take a lot to regain that lost trust, because there is nothing to stop it happening again. There is no acknowledgment or feedback, so people have no way of knowing that someone is listening. It is a lot more efficient to stop the problem from happening in the first place than having you, the head of a multi-million dollar company, running around mopping up after the event. This is nothing new - the Cluetrain Manifesto covered it, and Seth Godin/Clay Shirkey/Steve Collins have banged on about it for years since. People are mad at you at the moment because they loved WordPress and they feel betrayed - the emotion had to come from somewhere.
Volkher: I feel your pain. I did not have a single major issue with WordPress in 18 months on various blogs until release 2.5. I know others who are quite literally experiencing health issues as a result of the stress they feel around release 2.5.
Matthew Hill: correct me if I am wrong, but I think that the core of your issues is that the feedback mechanism for WordPress failed you in this instance?
Best regards, Andrew
Before I go to bed here (WP kept me up until almost 2 o’clock again), is there actually a good independent forum where I could find people discussing many of the issues that popped up here? You know, with solutions?
I don’t really think I’m all that inept at fixing stuff, I just need a seasoned pro or some other enthusiast two to point me in the right direction. For example: I have no idea why my feed is empty right now - I updated to 2.5.1 and that was it - and I don’t really expect any answer on the WP forums. Once the feed is back up, I could use all my other workarounds to keep the site running for now.
And, Andrew, thanks for having started this discussion here. I thought the comments were all level-headed and spot-on … I’d rather debate on that plain than on a mud-slinging one.
I’ll be back tomorrow.
Cheers!
@Andrew: It’s two fold:
(1) WP 2.5 was a flawed release.
(2) Registering dissatisfaction at (1) was an exercise in futility.
Of course if (1) had never happened, I’d never had known that (2) would be an issue. Therefore, all this could have been avoided if (1) hadn’t happened.
Quod erat demonstrandum.
Hi Matthew and Volkher,
thank you once again for your comments.
Volkher: thanks for being part of the discussion
I help to run the Aussie Bloggers Forum - it is not just about Australia 
Indeed, we’ve had a lot of discussion over WP2.5. We have a lot of members from outside of Australia and you would be most welcome - and we work hard at being helpful.
Matthew: I take your point - without the 2.5 issues a lot of people would never have felt the need to engage in the feedback process. Can I ask a supplementary question? Have you ever tried to submit feedback for earlier releases of WordPress? If not, was this because WP worked for you prior to this?
Cheers, Andrew
I think one little solution that would be nice at present is to release an easy roll back of the data files. I can delete everything and restore my pre update backups - but I will have lost a lot of work and comments. I would be quite happy to return to the pre 2.5 setup if I knew how to roll back the database files for compatibility.
Meeting everyone half way whilst waiting for 2.6 would go a long way to restoring some credibility - it shouldn’t be that difficult.
les
@Andrew: Nope, never had to feedback on WP before, because it worked fine and I didn’t have any problems with it.
Hi Les,
thank you for your comment.
We’re in a funny position: if we do work out an easy way to go back to 2.3.something, then we’re exposed to security issues, so we are sort of damned if we do and damned if we don’t.
I’d be interested to find out how other people have overcome the DB rollback issue (if they have, without just restoring a backup to a totally new database, doing an export, and then killing/recreating the original database (which is how I might try to do it myself - not an elegant solution at all).
Best regards, Andrew
Hi Matthew,
thank you for your response. I am in the same boat - never felt the need to try and submit a bug report before 2.5. I did go onto the forums once before to discuss something I’d found with a mobile format plugin.
I wonder how many other people are the same? Perhaps the forums always ran the way that they do now and no-one ever had an issue with them until 2.5? Regardless, I think it is fair to say that the forums have failed as a feedback mechanism for at least you and I.
Best regards, Andrew
It’s been great to talk to people on various blogs about this issue (especially yourself Andrew) and to get feedback from Matt Mullenweg and Liz Danzico. Sadly though, I don’t feel encouraged that Wordpress’ responsiveness will change as a result of these discussions.
Sure, a new release will come out, it may well fix things back to the way we like them and fix all the bugs. But I’m still perceiving an overall lack of accountability for the failures in responsiveness and the broken feedback mechanisms. I dunno, maybe it’s just me.
I’ll stick around to see what happens with 2.6 — I have ongoing projects that were upgraded to 2.5, so I’d like to hope these can be upgraded to a more usable version sometime soon.
For new projects, I’ll be switching to other software.
Cheers for now. I must get some sleep — 2am!
I will give 2.6 a shot also… but if that doesn’t address things… *waggle brows*
Matt - you say drag and drop is still there.
If so - care to point me at it? I *cannot* drag and drop widgets as I used to, if I’m meant to be able to… then there is a problem, because on a testblog - clean install - I *cannot* drag and drop widgets. At all. Nor could any of my WP owners.
As I said, I’ve gone back to 2.3.3 and refuse to install 2.5 anywhere.
Can we have an ETA for 2.6?
Also - you need to make it clear that the feedback and request forum is the right place, especially to your moderators, as pointed out by others. The responses people got disgruntled a LOT of users in those threads from what I saw.
It doesn’t give the best impression of WP to be told by a moderator to shut up and go away, in a sense, when voicing disappointment with a release.
I really like(d) WP, that’s why I use it. I want to keep on using it. So do my other WP users.
Lets make that happen and fix what’s broken.
BTW - The ideas of an Admin Interface theme is a good idea. It would let people customise it, and some of the ideas may well be really good for future releases.
I had really looked forward to 2.5 because of the openID thing. But alas…
I still think that Wordpress is the best blogging platform available despite 2.5.
I was one of those who had some run-ins with Otto42 on the “support”-forums on WP.org. The way he did refuse to acknowledge bugs (that are now officially bugs according to Matts comment #5 above) and he stated that the troubleshooting forum was not the right place for posting those problems annoyed me heavily. I also joined the forums after installing 2.5 since lots of things that worked perfectly were broken. If I only get the answer “server issue, change server settings” I cannot take that seriously, since a) it worked before and b) probably most users are not able or not allowed to change those settings. So that answer is shoving bugs and bad coding decisions on the users who feel helpless. I perfectly am able to tweak server settings but I cannot see why: 2.3.3 worked with the same settings without any problem.
I felt really left alone with my problems and that did frustrate me highly.
My main blog still runs on 2.3.3 until now (I did upgrade to 2.5 but was annoyed and got asked by my co-authors if this news system is a bad april fools joke), a few days ago there was an announcement of a security problem and there will be no more security updates for 2.3.x. Now I have to decide. I am under pressure now, I cannot wait for some 2.6 to emerge that hopefully fixes the problems that arose with 2.5 and I cannot update 2.3.3 to fix the security risk. So I have to switch to another software if I really want to do this or not. Since this is quite some work to do if you want to keep your posts and images this will be a one way solution, since I will not do that work again to switch back to Wordpress after it’s done.
This is really a pity, WP used to be the one system of choice by ease of use.
Thanks to AndrewBoyd for pointing out Majestic which I will give a try.
Hi Xanathon,
thank you for your comment.
Like you, I have a trust issue with Otto - like you, he told me it was my problem, and now Matt is saying that there really were some problems. I am not confident that any comment I make on the forums will be listened to and acted on.
That said - Matt M has invited us to get in touch with him about issues with the forum and with 2.5 - see comment 14 above. If you have not done so, I would encourage you to email Matt direct - he seems genuinely interested in what we have to say.
Best regards, Andrew