Kim, I’m in total agreement with you. I work with many newbie business owners, who just aren’t “techie”. While some of the skills seem simple to us, it’s an advanced skill to someone who doesn’t understand why you shouldn’t copy and paste from Word!

It’s also the non-techie users that need to be protected from the dreaded db bloat. Many don’t know enough about data bases for the thought to even occur to them. While we don’t need the bloat either, at least we know where to go for help and how to implement the solution.

Expecting new or non-tech folks to dig into code is sort of like expecting every new driver to be able to change the head gasket. The skills may come with time but shouldn’t be required to drive the car.

I like the idea of short & sweet settings being in the UI because I can simply tell people to “change this setting to “X” and there is no chance of them making an oops involving other code.

The less often a user has to mess with wp-config.php, the better. WP has a lot of inexperienced users who could totally bork their blogs if they have to constantly edit the config file. For all users, it is just a pain to have to make those changes in the config file when the UI already exists to take care of them.

Permalinks: This needs to stay in the UI. Troubleshooting an issue with someone’s blog may require setting the permalinks back to default and then reset them back. There are plugins (for example, WP Download Monitor) that require you to reset your permalinks after the plugin is upgraded. A user shouldn’t have to mess with the config file to do this.

Timezone: For those of us who have DST, we would have to edit wp-config.php to change the timezone twice a year. Why move it, when we can already reset it via the UI?

These are just a couple of items you mentioned, but there are reasons why each of them need to stay in the UI, since they are already there. The config file should be a “set it and forget it” once WP is installed.

How about we work together to get the post revisions setting into the UI instead?

This has got me thinking about UI bloat thought and I think the following could be moved out of UI into wp-config, after all they only need to be set once, and could be part of the setup. After that there is almost never any need to change them unless you are already doing something much more significant.

WordPress Address URL
Blog Address URL
Email Address (the admin one)
Timezone
Date Format
Time Format
Week starts on
Remote Publishing (debatable)
Encoding for pages and feeds
The entire privacy page
The entire permalink settings page
The entire miscellaneous page

If we can all agree that these are not needed in the UI then we can start a campaign to really clean out WordPress.

Instead, what we have here is the assumption that ALL WordPress users will want Post Revisions enabled as well as seemingly an infinite number of revisions created. And to top it all off, end users probably don’t even know what’s happening.

I was thinking about this issue at work and I got fired up about it yet again because it’s just plain stupid the way in which your common end user has no control over that feature because it’s assumed that most users won’t bother to configure it and it is UI bloat. I feel as though it’s current implementation is a slap to the face of WordPress users.

How about the UI admin option to customize how many lines the post box should be even though in the visual editor, you can drag the corner of the box to meet your requirements. Is that UI Bloat?

Adding it as a core feature in the admin panel seems a little overkill. But adding a simple line in the wp-config.php file which could be uncommented when necesary seems fairly reasonable to me. Controlling how often the revisions are stored is not as useful IMO as controlling the number of revisions but at least it offers some control to prevent the database size exploding.

The first thing I do when prepping a wp-config.php file for a new WP install is to include the following beforehand:

/** Change X to the number of post revisions you want WordPress to save to the database **/
define ('WP_POST_REVISIONS', false);

I turn them off completely, as I don’t want the headache of having to go back in and remove the old revisions from the database.

PS/Jeff, seems you didn’t install the Filosofo Comments Preview plugin on this blog. Could that be installed on this one too? :)