1704: The Improved Posting Experience

All right, WordPress, you win. After bugging me constantly with urges to try the “improved posting experience” while I was just trying to write my blog, let’s give this “improved posting experience” a go and see if it’s actually any better than the “posting experience” most WordPress users are accustomed to. Here we go, then.

So first up, it’s pretty blue. This puts it in line with the main WordPress.com site, where those using WordPress.com to manage their blog and/or be part of the WordPress community of bloggers can tweak their blog settings, fiddle with multiple sites and subscribe to other people’s blogs. In that sense, it’s consistent; however, where it’s inconsistent is with the rest of the WordPress dashboard, which is still the black and grey it’s ever been.

Let’s take a look at functionality.

There’s drag and drop for images… sort of. You can drag an image file onto the post editor, but this doesn’t automatically insert it into the post at the point where you drop it, disappointingly; rather, it simply brings up the regular media browser (which now doesn’t match the new editor) and uploads the image, at which point you can insert it into the post where you left the cursor. (This didn’t work first time I tried; I had to close the media browser, reposition the cursor, then open it again and then insert.) It also inexplicably forgets the default setting for image size that you might have been using in the “classic mode” (ugh) “posting experience”.

As for other functionality, there’s the same toolbar as the regular WordPress “posting experience” (no, I’m not going to stop the sarcastic quotation marks around that phrase anytime soon) but, like the media browser, it forgets your default settings, in this case whether you have the “kitchen sink” second row of buttons (allowing access to styles, underline, justification, text colour, special characters, indents, undo and redo — all pretty useful stuff) open or not.

Over on the right of the editor, there’s a bunch of pop-open menus for the post’s status (draft, scheduled, published), tags and categories, a featured image, whether the post will be shared on social media (and whether there will be a custom message), an attached location, a front-page excerpt, and the mysterious “advanced settings”, which include… drum roll…

…a custom slug, the author of the post, the format of the post, its visibility, whether or not it’s a sticky, and whether it allows likes, shares, comments and pingbacks. Hmm. Not all that advanced, really.

I can’t really tell what’s better about this “improved posting experience” to be honest, and in a number of ways it’s actually inferior. It certainly looks quite nice — the pop-open menus on the right keep things very neat and clean, for example — but it has this improved look at the expense of ease of access to information and settings.

The standard WordPress editor may be more cluttered and rather more clinical-looking than the soft blues of the “improved posting experience”, but it’s also considerably superior. Information and settings can be popped open and closed at will — it’s all open rather than closed by default — and the screen gives you much more information, most notably on the status bar at the bottom of the editor, where you have a word count and a “last edited” date — both of which are completely absent from the “improved posting experience”. There’s also easy access to all other aspects of your site via the left-hand side menu.

Also worthy of note: when I started writing this post, there was a button to switch back to “classic mode” which promptly disappeared when I saved a draft. Getting back to the standard editor required logging back into this site’s dashboard, going to the post list and then choosing to edit my draft. Somewhat cumbersome.

I can see the intent behind the “improved posting experience” — it’s to strip out all the stuff that might prove daunting to those less familiar with technology and software such as WordPress. It’s an attempt to make it into a simple and clean blog editor along the lines of Tumblr. Trouble is, that’s never what WordPress has been about; WordPress has always been the blog solution to go to when you want customisability and a lot of control over what you’re posting, when and how — and without having to mess around with HTML and CSS for styling.

Perhaps the “improved posting experience” will encourage more new users to give blogging a serious go. And that’s ultimately a good thing. For people like me, though, who have been using WordPress for years now, it’s very much a step backwards rather than forwards.