A stump

Earlier, I upgraded this blog to the latest WordPress version and found out that it’s not entirely bugless (that is, besides the validation problems of some portions of the generated output, as pointed out by Shelley). Some general notes follow:

The Media Library is indeed a welcome change: in previous WP versions, managing your files was a pain in the rear-end. However, the upload “dialog” (which is a JavaScript ‘modal’ screen) has ‘update/refresh/invalidate’ issues. Many times, the screen shows garbage¹. File uploads don’t appear to be working on Opera, at all, showing cryptic errors like ‘Specified file failed upload test’. Before you upload any images, be aware that you may wish to change the default width/height for generating thumbnails, particularly the checkbox, obscurely named ‘Crop thumbnail to exact dimensions (normally thumbnails are proportional)’. [You want to uncheck this option if you don’t want ugly re-sized thumbnails].

The admin interface overhaul, purportedly done to make it easier to find your posts and settings, is still as unfriendly as it was before. For example, it makes no sense to save the ‘visual editor’ setting in a user’s profile (you should be able to set it in the general Writing settings and then allow users to override it in their own profile). The same is true for settings for some of the Media Library stuff: the option to use link ‘URL’ vs. ‘Page/Post’ for images and that, should definitely somewhere in the Writing section (You may notice that all my mp3 samples and images redirect to a page/post first). And while we’re at it, I can’t stand the ‘autosave’ of posts and of course, you can’t turn it off in the settings.

On the overall, the release feels ‘patchy’ and rough at the edges: from what it appears, the only good change that this release brings is an excellent media-manager. Things still look unorganized: for example, how come you (still) can’t tag images and pages? I have the impression that this will require a rewrite of the codebase. Meh.