New WordPress Admin
A lot of people have been asking me about what I think about the new WordPress admin that's coming for version 2.4. No actually I am telling big fat porkie lies. No one has asked me what I think, but I'm not going to let that stop me. Lets talk the new WordPress admin shall we.
Swiped directly from the demo site that can be found at hyper123, this is what the glorious new WordPress admin in version 2.4 is starting to look like. I say starting to look like, because you can see that they've got a while to go in sorting out all the breakages everywhere. In fact by Matt's own addmission, it's only 10-20% complete, which is why they've decided to wait until March to release this version, because obviously they're not there yet.
Now obviously i've got a slight bit of interest in what's going on in the admin, simply because I (and others, whom I really shouldn't speak for) gave a year's worth of our free time (more or less) to the creation of a revamped admin panel for WordPress. The powers that be, (well Matt actually) didn't like it, which is why it never got included into the core.
So nearly 2 YEARS after the efforts that we did on that particular project, we are now finally getting a new administration panel design. Others seem to have tried and failed as well (the likes of Brian and i believe some other Automattic employee, I'm not into the WP community since they went commercial). Is this the thing that Happy Cogs have produced? I'm not sure.
Obviously they've decided to go away from the colour scheme that was introduced due to the Shuttle project. What you think the blue that you see came from somewhere else? Yeah no. The other thing that has changed, so far, is the dashboard. Last thing that I can see is the comments now have a number at the top to tell you how many comments in moderation or whatever. Apart from that nothing to report really.
For my money however, this is really like putting a bandaid onto a broken leg. Seriously. It's past the time for this. This would have been bloody relevant several years ago, not now. Now, well it's completely outdated and anything less of a complete and utter redesign (and that includes rethinking how your menu structure actually works) if you want it to be something relevant, fresh, exciting and ultimately usable by the widest range of people....but in that case you might as well start from the beginning and building something truly new and exciting...oh wait we're already doing that.
by Khaled Abou Alfa
Tagged:
Code Monkey, Design Nation, Disposable Culture, Internet, Software and Wordpress
Thanks for the feedback --- I appreciate it. I hope you keep an eye on the admin in the coming months as it starts to better reflect the bigger idea, which is a fair amount of core functionality change, not just the surface changes you've seen so far.
Wow. That's a mess.
As you know, I was never a fan of either the current Wordpress logo, the fascination with Serif fonts or the blue colors that ended up in the current admin. I know that YOU like blue, I'm looking at it, but your blue works, the current Wordpress blue truly doesn't.
This, however, is a goddamn mess. You don't fix a broken admin by changing a few colors here and there. Usability design is about making choices FOR the user, so he/she doesn't have to! I don't see anything like that here... just confusing pastel colors, more boxes, and lots and lots of confusion.
You can call me bitter. Go on. I consider myself quite apt in usability design, and I offered my services to Matt for free. Nearly all my suggestions were shot down, only two suggestions from yours truly actually made it into Wordpress. The tabs, and the WYSIWYG editor: both were handled horrificly.
There is one good thing, though, this will make Habari look far superior.
Joen, I hope you saw above that this does not represent a finished product. It's work-in-progress as people tackle different parts of the implementation. Many of the disagreements in Shuttle's design-by-committee process were the result of different points of view on usability design, and to some extent none of us were "right" without usability testing of the issue in the context of WP's users. Shuttle also ignored basic WP problems like media uploading and handling. The fine folks Happy Cog did many hours of user testing with both newbies and experienced users and reexamined many of the core interaction assumptions.
There's also a project underway to publish a set of interface guidelines similar to Apple's or Yahoo's detailing what was found in the research, so core WP devs, plugin authors, and other web devs can make better decisions about interactions in the future. (Look for that mid-Feb.)
I think we have a real opportunity to break new ground and positively impact millions of bloggers, but there's a lot of work ahead.
To be fair, I think I will wait to see it first hand before I say my final opinion. But do I like what I see? No, actually. I cannot tell if there is more under the hood (as per Matt's first comment) or not. So I agree with Joen that it looks really like a mess.
Although Habari is still at the very beginnings and the admin panel is so primitive (still giving you a usable interface however), I think we are far ahead, you would know that by just taking a look at how it is written. Anyways that is just me and I am no code guru.
What I would like bring to subject is the Shuttle. Actually I wanted to ask you Khaled, Now that we know that Shuttle is not gonna be part of WP (well we did not know until reading this post that it was not accepted by the WP community), will you consider it for Habari? I mean I know Habari has its own Admin UI design but wouldn't it be a good idea to embed some of the Shuttle stuff into it? You spend a lot of hours after all working on such a lovely design and I hate to see it "buried" in its mockups. What do you think?
Matt,
I do understand that this is a work in progress, in fact it screams it.
The problem is, the process is either very unfamiliar to me, or completely odd; there are GIF files all sliced up, CSS and HTML written and colors and fonts chosen. Why would one do that work, unless it's going in the general direction of the end result? Weren't there any Photoshop comps to preceed it?
I know that you stress incremental upgrades. I've talked to you about this in person: you prefer updates that can be checked into the SVN, tested, and then improved. That's all good, but it doesn't rule out a "guiding star" Photoshop comp that's a bit more radical in its changing the admin look. An incremental process, however, should rule out changes as seen above; CSS, HTML and images all sliced together, everything else thrown out. That _is_ a radical change, and if there wasn't any PSD to preceed this, I can't for the life of me figure out _why_ one would spend so much time working on CSS and HTML, if it's so much a "work in progress" that it might all be for nothing. So much wasted effort doesn't make sense to me, that's why I'm treating this as the general direction of the design. There's no "mockup" about this.
Happy Cog is full of talented people. While I have no idea what they've provided you with, I'm sure their feedback has been valuable. Can you give me an example of this feedback applied to the above designs?
I remember what happened from 1.5 to 2.0. It was the unveiling of a bastard child of Shuttle. It was throwing out the old CSS and slapping in a new one, one that certainly didn't do justice to the Shuttle design work. Definately it wasn't an "incremental SVN like" update either, it was a total revamp, for the worse. Because that happened, I can't see why it shouldn't happen again from 2.3 to 2.5.
Now text is a terrible way to communicate. We should have been talking face to face. So I'd like to stress that I still love Wordpress and want to see this ship go in the right direction. For that reason, I took some time out of my day to make a usability review of the above. I'm in the process of PDF'ing it, but so far you can read an HTML version on my site:
http://www.noscope.com/media/wp25-usability-review/
I've commented on various screenshots of the demo site, and given bulletted advice for your consideration. I really, really hope you'll read it, and once I get my PDF ready I hope that you'll consider forwarding it to those involved in the design process.
Tiny correction, I meant to say "There's no "mockup" about this." instead of "There's "mockup" about this.". Khaled buddy? Edit for me?
Joen said:
Done :).
[...] admin overhaul until it actually looks like an admin overhaul. In the meantime, go and read what Khaled has to say. Also, much love for Joen’s cutting description of the burnt orange as ‘curry [...]
Hello All -
I recognize the first glimpses are a work in progress, but they were released precisely to solicit comments -- correct? Ok. Here's what I think:
* Color scheme - fine. I like the dark orange (or whatever you wish to name it) with the blue.
* Reorganization for usability gets a D+, so far. Why? Aside from the "Right Now" box on the dashboard, and the AJAX (I assume) number of post comments, there doesn't seem to be much thought yet given to streamlining by efficient organization and interface programming. Heck, the problem with the 2nd line of links at top, which gets tedious when you use a number of plugins, hasn't been addressed -- yet. How about drop-down menus? It's a basic usability concept that people do get confused with more than just seven links in a navigation menu.
Bottom line: You can talk about usability design studies, but the ability to sample different takes on reorganizing the admin interface already exists in the form of plugins (Tiger is one), and the screenshots presented here (I liked the left sidebar for quick how-to notes) is already out there. And, those options reveal interfaces that are more streamlined, and usable than what has been presented so far. Just test them before a focus group. Why not set a bunch of folks in front of the 3-5 existing interface revisions/versions, and study what helps them work better and faster?
Final questions: What's the point of releasing this peek? Is the Automattic crew really taking constructive criticism at this point, or defending their work based on "it's early yet" statements?
- Scott
"I recognize the first glimpses are a work in progress, but they were released precisely to solicit comments — correct? [...] What’s the point of releasing this peek?"
Actually someone else in the community took the trunk code and made the "demo" on their own accord. We were not planning on soliciting feedback for at least another 3-5 weeks. Because this could happen I considered holding back the changes and doing one giant commit with everything in a mostly finished state, but that sort of breaks the point of version control and makes it much harder for people in the community to get involved in the implementation. I sent out a message warning people running trunk" tha it'd be pretty broken for a while, and we dove in.
Just last night some pretty major changes happened to navigation menus, so already these screenshots and demo are out of date.
This looks nothing like Shuttle, and to me, that is VERY disappointing. Directly comparing Shuttle and the 'new' Wordpress Admin panel...ugh, please, for the love of [insert deity here] give us Shuttle.
http://img242.imageshack.us/img242/622/mainfd8.png
Who thought red/orange would be a good color choice? It just stands out as ugly. But color aside, the 'new' admin panel is a huge waste of space. I understand that it is far from done but the tabs alone are over-sized considering the number of plugins that integrate into the panel.
I was hoping that Shuttle would be a plugin since it's apparent Wordpress will never it...just poor decisions in general, sorry.
*Note: Khaled, Habari requires PHP 5.2, any chance a lite version will be released one day for users still using PHP 4.x.x? I've pestered my hosting and they keep dragging their feet but i can't complain because the price is good :-!
Khaled, If you showed someone the shuttle work that you had done but were not yet wanting to release - because you had the luxury of keeping it hidden - then I'm sure you would had criticism and I'm sure you would have said that it was okay, it was early and "Just wait for the end result". And yet you stomp all over this?
Isn't that just unfair? Can't you give the same benefit to someone else?
It doesn't matter what the project is - it is early.
And let's say it was kept quiet and then released - you'd have been all over it saying that had you seen it earlier you'd have given constructive feedback.
Given what you do and your experience your castigation is surprising and disappointing.
Mark, the issue here is I look at what Joen did above by spending his time to tell the peeps at wordpress what they seem to be doing right and what they seem to be doing wrong and for my money, while that's a completely admirable task, it's ultimately futile.
You see there was a time where i actually truly BELIEVED that as a user to an open source programme i could contribute to make it better for all the users. i gave my time freely as did/still do, many others. ultimately it was futile because the decision lands with one man. That is the harsh reality of the WP model.
My time is better spent trying to devote to a software model that appreciates the feedback and hard work.
And please don't intimate like you know what i would do in a given situation. I have not spoken about the wordpress admin since i announced that Shuttle would not be included into the core (and that was May of last year), so saying that if it was just released in one lot, i would be all over it saying i would have given constructive feedback is RUBBISH. I would do no such thing thank you very much. The reason is that I would have had to given more time to WP, time which frankly the software and the people who make it don't deserve.
I've moved onto better things which is what the above post was really about. If you read my post, i merely highlighted what I could see has changed so far, after clearly stating that this all was no where near a completely finished product, and then my personal opinion about what this means to me. Wordpress is how we used to use blogging software, Habari is the future.
[...] I see on the demo site may be a “work in progress”, in fact that’s the main counter argument, but there’s a real problem with that. It’s not that I mind baby blue and curry red. [...]
I did a little writeup, summarizing some thoughts on this. It's in the pingback, or here:
http://www.noscope.com/journal/2008/01/wordpress-habari-and-the-iphone
Uh, it's a public SVN repository that lots of people (including me) monitor through the wp-svn list. It was going to get out, and then people are going to comment about it -- what else could you have expected?
If you really didn't want feedback, keep it private until it's reached the point where you would like it...
I was just about to say exactly the same as Robin. You, you being Matt and/or Wordpress, can't expect to put something like this into trunk and then think that no one will comment on it.
I would think that, given the time Wordpress has been under public development, that this would be a well known fact to most people.
So, let me get this straight. You want community involvement, but no public comments until you say so? Sorry, thats just now how it works.
As I've stopped following Wordpress development closely, I can't say if there has been any mockups etc. made available before this stuff was commited, but it sure looks like this has come as a surprise to most people.
It will be very interesting to see where this ends up, but implementing a design change that ultimately requires code changes before the code changes are in place sounds like a bad idea to me.
[...] Broken Kode | New WordPress Admin - Khaled has stricken up some nice debate on the design and usability of the soon to be updated WordPress admin. [...]
In the sentence I quoted above the person seems to think that we did this public demo of a clearly broken and unstyled admin section as an official thing. Dustin is comparing a completely finish and polished admin markup to one with 2/3rds of the page as an unstyled unordered list.
People who follow SVN know the context, understand the process, and are comfortable with things being broken, the majority of the people who saw the story on WeblogToolsCollection do not.
It's not their fault, I think it's a fault in how it was presented. It's also not being updated, so for example in Joen's excellent comments he talked about things that had already changed in trunk code.
@Matt, i was comparing what was presented to the community as the future admin panel and shuttle, which has been around for a while.
Why didn't you or someone present a mockup of what the expected wordpress admin will look like? If i've missed a post where this has happened, than i apologize, but at this point, the color scheme alone has sent me searching for a wordpress admin panel plugin.
No offense to anyone here, but even though there were some disagreements and such, I really think it's a shame and a waste to just let all that Shuttle work go down the toilet for good.
I really think the Shuttle design should be released publicly, to at least give some others a chance to finish it or maybe improve it. "They" could release it as another option for control panel design...
There are ALOT of people, including myself that still loves the Shuttle design, and would love to see it finish and be used... Of course, that's just my 2 cents and it doesn't help much given the current crappy economy...
Spencerp, the Shuttle design has been in the public domain for everyone to do with as they please for a while. Hell I can't remember someone actually used it for an internal admin project of their own.
It was started as a plugin (i'd have to search my previous links now) but alas it's there fore whomever wants to do stuff with it.
Khaled said:
It was? Hmm, I haven't seen it any where? Did you provide a download link, or have it available some where else? I must have overlooked "that" before... Or wait, what you mean by "public domain for everyone" ? I'm riding on negative hours of sleep again, you'll have to excuse me... :(
I'm with Spencerp on this, the Shuttle was a great idea and it may still be, but it was always _closed_, it was discussed with the WordPress team and that's all we knew about it, if i would have been released after it was declined to be in core, the community could have taken it and improve it, turn it into a plugin or even made a fork out of it, but i was not released, and then it just died.
My advice, or 2 cent as you like to call it, is to release the Shuttle and see what the community is able to do with it.
marcoss said:
I completely and whole-heartedly agree.
As far as I know, there was never any way to grab a copy of the Shuttle, there was only screen shots of the mock-up, am I correct? Please Khaled, release the images, css, files and etc... LOL!
@spencerp Whats stopping you from converting the Mockups into CSS XHTML. Like Khaled said it was released into the public domain. The shuttle interface was just an idea. The rest was left for the community to decide. You want Khaled to do all the hard work for you?
Arpit jacob said:
No. I was assuming from what he said, was that there was already a plugin/archive zip (which contains everything you would need; files, images, css file, etc etc) out there for the public to grab.
I COULD grab those JPG screen shots and slice them up, but most know it's tough to just use a JPG image of a design and go from there... PSD is preferred... :P
And yeah, if "they" were building on this before, took the screen shots of it(even though that doesn't necessarily mean they had it built up to the point as shown in screen shots) that I'm sure there would be SOME form of CSS/XHTML/image files laying around on a back-up disk some where to hand out to people...
spencerp said:
Assumption is the mother of all fuckups :). The mockups were created and talked about and yes they have been tidied up however like Arpit said, the work could have easily been done form the jpgs. I can post the psds but to be honest someone did try and make a plugin out of the basic elements (not so much the actual functionality about 2 months after we released the images into the public domain. I've not heard anything about whether he finished it to be honest, so I find your comments and the comments above slightly confusing, but alas obviously I wasn't clear enough (even though i did try).
From a personal perspective, while it's nice that people like the Shuttle design, I think that time and energy could be better spent contributing to Habari, which is approaching things from a fresh perspective and has a model that the more you contribute the more goes into the core software. it's run in a very different way and has got something of a core active community that is growing at a sure pace. Like I said, WP is the past, Habari is the future.
Khaled said:
Haha. Ain't that the truth.
Khaled said:
Ahh okay. Sorry Khaled, wasn't trying to be confusing. I guess we were both confused at each others comments and that doesn't help much. :P But I understand NOW what you're both saying. ;)
Khaled said:
This may be so, but each person has their own agenda regarding softwares. I joined the Habari email lists back when it first started basically, I just couldn't keep up with all the emails and stuff. It got out of hand in the Inbox. So I unsubscribed to the lists and etc...
I wanted to see what it was about, test it a little bit and etc. But I just didn't have the time for "it". I barely have time maintaining my WordPress blogs and posting to them on a daily basis and etc.
I first started using Plog/Lifetype then went to WordPress. Been with WordPress for a few years now, and don't really plan on leaving it any time soon. I *might* try out Habari again, but it won't be anytime soon though. I'm just swamped with general life, not to mention my online "life" which includes being married to WordPress. :P No offense of course... LOL!
But thanks for the comments regarding Shuttle! :D
[...] comments came in response to criticism on Khaled Abou Alfa’s Broken Kode blog of the still inchoate WordPress admin theme [...]
[...] progetto per un rifacimento totale della sezione amministrativa di WP. C’è anche chi, come Khaled, è arrivato a sostenere che WordPress è il passato, mentre il futuro è Habari. E, ultima notizia [...]
The Wordpress admin panel is the weakest link in the project right now so best of luck to anyone tackling this (huge!) project.
It is so important to get it right.
The Tiger Admin theme would be perfect if it worked in IE though, no!?!?
5 Pingbacks to New WordPress Admin