Daniel Bachhuber who works with WordPress.com VIP Services has published a guide covering some key differences with data validation and sanitization. His explanation is not so technical that even I understood it for the most part. If you’re a developer, definitely give the guide a read and give Daniel some feedback. ∞
Plugin Review – Expanded Admin Menus
If you’re not happy about WordPress 3.3 taking away the ability to vertically expand and collapse menu items, you now have at least one option to bring back that functionality. Sort of. After quite a bit of discussion amongst community members regarding the new menu flyouts in WordPress 3.3, Aaron D. Campbell contributed with a thought out post which concluded with a link to a plugin he created called Expanded Admin Menus.
After activating the plugin in WordPress 3.3 Beta 1, this is what your left handed navigational menus will look like.
Unfortunately, it’s a far cry from what users enjoyed in WordPress 3.2.1. Instead of being able to choose which main menu item is expanded or collapsed, all of them are expanded. That deafening cry of pain you hear is from mouse scroll wheels all across the globe. After using the plugin for five minutes, it was clear to me that it’s even more of a usability nightmare for myself then dealing with the flyout menus. With all menu items presented at once, my eyes have to scroll through each one to find the specific link I’m looking for. I’m presented with too much information at one time making browsing a pain in the neck. If that were not enough, the collapsed menu looks completely different than the normal collapsed menu, probably due to the CSS it uses.
Collapsed Version Of Expanded Menu Items
While I’m not going to discount the use of this plugin because of that particular bug, the bottom line is that this plugin does not solve the problem that the forum thread was dedicated to. It’s not about having all of the admin menus opened or closed. It was the end user opportunity to pick and choose which menus were vertically expanded or collapsed while being able to have multiple menus opened or closed. Nice effort on the part of Aaron to provide an option to users who loved that particular feature in WordPress 3.2 but in its current form, the plugin comes nowhere close to solving the problem.
WPWeekly Episode 115 – WordPress 3.3. Beta 1 Edition
In this episode of WordPress Weekly, I give you the news making headlines of the week. I also give you a rundown of what to look for in WordPress 3.3. Beta 1 and give you my experience thus far with some of the new features. The end of the show has a 3 minute audio sound byte from Schipulcon where the founders of Drupal and WordPress shared the stage to talk about Open Source.
Stories Discussed:
WordPress.org Experiences DNS Issues – Not Hacked
Win A Ticket To WordCamp Toronto
Plugin Repository Now Has A Proper 404 Page
Spots By Interconnect/It
The Best Thing On Peter Brights iPhone Is The WordPress App
Things To Look For In WordPress 3.3 Beta 1
WPWeekly Meta:
Subscribe To WPWeekly Via Itunes: Click here to subscribe
Length Of Episode: 37 Minutes
Download The Show: WordPressWeeklyEpisode115.mp3
Listen To Episode #115:
Video Featuring Matt Of WordPress With Dries Of Drupal
Here is the recorded video featuring the presentation of Matt Mullenweg of WordPress with Dries Buytaert of Drupal discussing open source. Kudos goes out to the Schipulcon group for getting these two together for an awesome presentation. The audio is terrible until you hit the 4 minute mark. If you want to see a transcript for some of the questions you can read them on the Schipul Blog. Definitely watch from 32 minutes onward as that is when the audience starts asking some pretty good questions.
Share Your Experience With WordPress 3.3 Beta 1 With Me Tonight
For those that don’t know, I produce a live podcast every Friday evening at 9P.M. Eastern time on Talkshoe.com called WordPress Weekly. On tonight’s episode, I’d like to hear from you regarding your experience thus far with WordPress 3.3. beta 1 if you’ve had a chance to use it. I’m especially interested to know your thoughts on the new fly out menus and the drag and drop media uploader. If you can’t call in to the show tonight, at least show up in the chat room to be part of the conversation as the show is recorded live.
Score Tickets To WordCamp Toronto 2011
If you’re planning on going to WordCamp Toronto 2011 and have yet to purchase tickets, think about participating in this contest being held by Miroslav Glavic. The rules are simple. All you have to do is leave a comment on the post and explain how attending the event will help you. Each winner will receive one ticket to the event. Of course, the winners will need to pay for their own accommodations and travel costs to get there. Winners will be chosen on October 19th. ∞
UK Civil Service Site Switches To WordPress
We (the Digital Engagement team) were tasked with producing a new site at very little cost and within a six week window. To restructure the content to make it easier to find we used Google analytics to analyze typical user journeys. Harnessing user insight will be an iterative process through the ongoing development of this site.
We chose to use WordPress as it offers a simple, quick (with such a short development window) and flexible open source solution to a site primarily designed for publishing content. As such it is easy to use for a wide range of content editors and, of course, provides significant cost savings for maintenance and development. Rather than develop a theme ourselves we chose to use a theme called ‘striking’ developed by Kaptinlin that fitted what we needed with a little customization. – Via Holding the Fort
-UK Civil Service Site Switches To WordPress
WordPress Not The Choice For Multinational Search
Chris Liversidge of Search Engine Land gives an explanation as to why WordPress is not his platform of choice when it comes to multinational search. I was with him up until the point he discussed security where he states that WordPress is plagued by frequent security updates. This is not true. Security within WordPress has gotten better with time, not worse and it’s not like we’re updating WordPress every two weeks. I’m not sure what Chris wants in a CMS platform. One update a year? One update every 3 months that fixes security vulnerabilities instead of getting that fix immediately? ∞
Revamping The 404 Page For The Plugin Repository
WPBeginner has laid out an interesting question. Do we need a better 404 page for WordPress plugins repository? They think so and I do to. I’ve experienced the issue of clicking a plugin link only to be redirected magically to the plugin repository page without any explanation as to why. From here, I perform a search to find the plugin that I was linked to only to come up empty. In my opinion, the 404 page on the plugin repository should give a few explanations as to why the plugin was not found. It could have been its removal, its suspension, or a bad link but at least give a little explanation. I especially like the idea presented by GraphicsCove in providing a list of 3 or 5 similar plugins. I’d also like to see a little bit of Matt’s witty humor. What better place to put it than on a 404 page.
If you had the opportunity to create the 404 page, what information would you present on it?
Some Not Happy With Flyout Menus
In my short look at WordPress 3.3 Beta 1, I highlighted the fact that all menus were going to receive the Flyout treatment. The ability to vertically expand or collapse menus will be disappearing in favor of the flyout animation. Personally, I like the feature as I now get to see all of the menu items without having to click a button. However, many others have voiced their discontent with this User Interface change. In fact, there is a thread on the WordPress.org support forums that is nearing 50 posts specifically dealing with this issue.
Even though I like flyouts, I don’t have any problem with the way menus work in WordPress 3.2. In fact, it was the best of both worlds. I typically use the Icons only approach which has the flyouts while always having the option to see the full menu with the ability to vertically expand or collapse. In the newest instance, that choice has been taken away. This response by Jonschlinkert has some interesting questions that I think would be good to have answered from the WordPress UI Team.
Who was asking you to remove the expand/collapse feature? Can you point us to that request and the support for it? In other words, why is the designer “fixing” something that wasn’t broken?
If you’re interested in seeing how the feature evolved, look at the log for ticket #18382. For the curious, here is a short list of statements made in the WordPress Development Channel from May 31st 2011 to October 11th 2011, talking about the flyout menus. Nothing really exciting to read with the exception of Otto42s comment on September 19th.
Otto42 – they make everything take like 3 times longer to find. i used to just scroll the page and go right to the menu i want.. now it’s a matter of hunting and searching and checking the f-ing flyout menus
If Flyout menus get past beta and are in the final release, that is when we will be able to measure the success or failure of the change. If a major revolt happens, it’s not like reverting the change will be hard and it could come in a follow up point release. At the end of the day though, the folks in the forum thread have to be commended for providing valuable feedback during the beta testing process.
Related But Not Required Reading: Why Hover Menus Do Users More Harm Than Good
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