Editor Feedback
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I’m finding that working with menus in the new editor lost my parent-child structure in my main menu. If I open menu customization in the new editor, parent-child is gone, while if look at the page structure in the old editor, it’s as it should be. “Confusing”
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I don’t use the new editor much — I prefer the classic and will use it as long as it remains available — but last night, I was using my Kindle to make a correction to a post. Which is when realized the new editor does not include the drop-down list that lets you select a post’s author. I understand most blogs are single author, but there is a large minority that have multiple editors, authors, and contributors.
Some of my contributors write directly in the editor, but others send me their text in Word or some other format. These need to be copied and pasted and the proper author selected. Which is impossible in the new editor because the option isn’t there. You should put it back. Because there are a LOT of multi-contributor blogs out there and we aren’t all the same.
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The big problem with the new editor for me is the lack of image editing. I upload images direct from my Dropbox Camera Uploads folder, and invariably I want to crop them before inserting them in a post. Please can we have the image editor back.
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I use The Studio Theme for my website (www.sarapolish.com), and in the old editor there was a whole area where I could choose to organize posts into portfolios. Is there no way to do this on the new editor?
So far I have to go back to use the old editor in order to upload my posts correctly, otherwise they just get put into the blog. Note: these are not categories I’m looking for, but portfolio sections that this theme allows you to create.
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Mostly what is wrong with the new editor are the assumptions that were made in its design: that all of us are single bloggers who don’t use sophisticated graphics or have more than one author/editor. Nor, apparently, are we supposed to write long or complex pieces, or require links to multiple posts or sites.
There are so many functions missing that used to enable a relatively complex post that uses text and graphics … and they aren’t just in new places. They have been eliminated completely.
Whether or not they are frequently used or used by a minority of bloggers, unless you want to lose your that very LARGE minority — we need a tool set — an editor — that supports a grown-up blog. We really are the backbone of your customer base, the people who start a blog and work at it for years, not just a few weeks until we get bored. Businesses and authors, photographers and writers. Artists. We need tools. Real tools. Sturdy tools with legs. We need more ways to handle graphics and text, not less.
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Have you tried to use the custom menu?
I just attempted to… and it’s almost impossible to use! To turn a parent link to a child link was a simple drag-and-drop operation in the original back end. Now you have to click Move, and then click Move above or Move below the link’s current position, and only then can you make it a child page link.
It’s beyond clunky.
To the WP staffer now assigned to this thread: Please try this yourself and tell me if you think this is more efficient than the drag-and-drop method. Thanks!
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@teepee12
Well said. I’m a single blogger with a simple blog, but I take a lot of care with selecting and positioning images, and often go back to change, resize, or move them after I’ve made a post to improve the look and feel.
I’ve reverted to using the classic dashboard edit function. -
@toutparmoi
It is disheartening when I was hoping for more sophisticated text and graphics handling capabilities but instead got the equivalent of a small box of crayons. I thought the classic editor could be improved by adding functionality. Instead, WordPress has decided we don’t need a real editor at all. It doesn’t bode well for the future. -
I fled to a self-hosted WordPress site following the massive changes last December and January.
I just set up a new WordPress.com site for my father using the new editor. The experience reinforced the wisdom of my decision.
The comments on this thread echo those we made last year—the new UI is stripped down, unpleasant to use on a desktop, counter-intuitive, and not particularly well-suited to long form blogging.
Time and again, users are assured that old features will be added back into the new editor. This begs several questions: why were they removed in the first place? Why, after countless posts and months of development time, was this unfinished editor foisted on users?
I’m glad to see that the old editor remains intact, but WordPress.com’s new look and ethos doesn’t bode well for the future.
For those willing to pay the costs and deal with a little more complexity, I would suggest seriously considering the possibility of self-hosting. I banged my head on the wall here for a month a year ago before leaving. I understand that this isn’t an ideal choice for many, perhaps most, but given the state of the new UI, it warrants serious consideration.
I only hope they don’t decide to “improve” the WordPress.org UI in a manner that mirrors the WP.com interface.
Best of luck to all of you who are struggling with the new editor.
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@fjordaniv
I don’t know what self-hosting involves. I’ll check it out, but at this point in my life, I wanted blogging to not be work. That’s the point of retirement. Ultimately, it seems we will all have to make a choice: to keep blogging, but somewhere else, or give up. I’ve put so much time and effort into this site, I don’t know that I have the strength of character to do it again. I’m not even sure I want to try. It is very discouraging. -
Let me echo what apo11o and others have said: “I agree with apo11o. I have no intention on using a less-functional & too-blue editor however “new and high speed” it claims to be. “
That said, a few problems:
(1) I have a link that was copied and pasted. I have repeatedly checked it to make certain it is correct. Yet, it 404’s. This is the link:
https://grandtrines.wordpress.com/2015/12/01/mercury-trine-uranus-2015-12-01-fire-trine-continues/ and the page that links to it is a front page (static page) located at https://grandtrines.wordpress.com (for now, but I change the front page every 24 to 48 hours). It just does not work, and that is very, very strange. (I have been coding HTML since 1996, so I am led to believe that something odd is happening, weird CSS problems, or something like that, which interact with a perfectly good link that should be left alone.)(2) The “new” editor is a disaster for me on multiple levels. I click on part of the page to edit, start to type, and it spontaneously takes me to some other part of the page, typically the top. It is pretty annoying and becomes very unpleasant about the 20th time it happens.
2(a) Clicking “Update Page” FREQUENTLY asks me if I “really” want to leave this page (or stay). Huh? I just clicked update; why ask me that. It is another nuisance that becomes hyper-annoying about the 20th time in.
2(b) In the edit-view page-edit again cycle, at random times the editor asks me if I want to “restore” a “newer” version of the page I just made an edit to and published. Again: huh? How can this be, especially if I have *NO* other open editor windows? What newer version could possibly exist after I publish the page and (implicitly) close the editor in the process? Echoes to the NSA? (Only half joking.)
Also: please stop hiding the old statistics page. It is MUCH better than the new one. And forcing that awful new sidebar on us removes much needed functionality. Give us options to keep, and use, the old sidebar, old stats page, and old editor. They may not be mobile-friendly, or whatever is driving this push for the buggy, reduced functionality stuff, but they work very well for those of us competent enough to use them.
Sorry for a rant, but this has been building up over several weeks of seemingly endless annoyances. Surely others are going through this same thing also.
As an aside, I generally adore WordPress. If I didn’t like it so much, these new changes couldn’t make me so mad. If you did the same thing at any of several inferior platforms, who would care? But, here, they *matter*.
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Where do the pix from Zemanta go, and do I have to enable them again?
Sorry, do you mean pictures you embedded in the past in the WP Admin editor using Zemanta? Since that is not a part of the new editor, I will need to research that a bit, however, I wanted to clarify the question first.Yes, I’m talking about the Content Suggestions–pictures and related content–I’ve been embedding in the WP Admin editor using Zemanta. In the Classic version, it appeared in the right sidebar. Sidebars are blank in the new editor page.
WP wants to know what I want in the improved version?
I want it to do everything the WP Admin version does, without requiring more clicks. Functionality added over and above that base line I’ll consider improvements.
For my further view, see @teepee12, @toutparmoi, and @fjordaniv. They say it better than I can.
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One more thing: loss aversion frequently drives bad decisions. If most of your old, established, loyal users, HATE a new editor version, and you keep it thinking “we have to make the new version work,” then that is the WRONG decision. It means you are chasing a sunk cost, like a losing gambler in Vegas who has lost everything, even his/her dog, and cannot admit defeat. LISTEN to your users when they are telling you they LOVE the existing version but NOT the “new” one.
See, also:
(1) Loss aversion: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Loss_aversion
(2) Sunk costs: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sunk_costs
(3) Sunk cost fallacy (video): https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vpnxd31y0FoI understand your desire to tap the “mobile” market; they are 50% of my traffic. BUT, this current effort isn’t the way to do it. Leave the other stuff in place for those of us who can use it properly.
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You can export your blog and have your stats and comments transferred. Self hosting isn’t especially difficult, especially with a managed plan where the host takes care of all of the WordPress updates. Many of the free themes on WordPress.com are also available for WordPress.org.
There’s a bit of work involved in setting up the new theme, but the editor and dashboard are very familiar, as they’re virtually identical to the old WP.com tools.
My site was getting rather large, and I was already considering the transition to a self-hosted site last year when the controversy over the new dashboard broke. Many of us complained vociferously, but it was evident that WP.com was taking a path I had no wish to follow. At the time, the changes were frustrating and detracted from my writing. Those changes paled in comparison to those of the new editor, which is an absolute nightmare to deal with.
Timethief brought up an excellent point in one of those threads: we’re here because Worpress allows us to enjoy what we’re doing. When that is no longer the case, when we have to fight the tools rather than using them, when we spend more time writing posts on forums directed at people who tell us to be more “open minded” than we do on our own blogs, there’s a problem. We raked them over the coals last year, but this is worse than anything we had to deal with before.
Self-hosted sites come with cost and added complexity, but I already had a premium theme (which I cancelled) and the Premium upgrade here, and my new site cost less. What you gain is control, flexibility, and a usable interface that steps out of your way to let you enjoy blogging.
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and my other fellow disgruntled bloggers.
WordPress isn’t listening to us. The argument that “we get all this wonderful stuff for free and should be grateful” also means they get all these wonderful bloggers for free … and it is from us — many of us who actually DO pay for our sites, by the way — from US that WordPress is able to generate profit. We are the content they sell. We are the people who make a platform into something that other people want to visit.
Am I grateful for the space? Yes. Are they grateful to us for loyally putting up with this crap? No.
They apparently believe that we are dispensable, easily replaced by baby bloggers typing 140 word text messages on their mobile phones. Although people may read blogs on their phones, I don’t actually know anyone who creates a blog on a phone. Making the blogs display properly on small devices is a worthy goal. Forcing us to write ONLY for small devices is nonsensical.
I began this site — 350,000 hits and four year ago — for fun. It has been fun. It has given me new friends and sometimes enough pride and joy. That WordPress doesn’t care about me or you or anyone because they have this weird compulsion to create a platform for bloggers who don’t really exist … well … once upon a time, there were other companies like DEC and Wang and a whole bunch of others. They didn’t listen either. They are gone. Geocities. Remember them?
If I do not pay lots of money to blog, the opposide is also true — no one pays ME to blog, either. It is a labor of love. I do not understand why WP feels a need to make it harder for me to do what I want. I don’t see why they won’t let us choose to work with one or another tool set. Why do they CARE which tools I use?
What are they trying to prove except that if you aggravate your customers enough, they will go away? Because that’s what’s next for me. I don’t have enough energy to start over again. I’ve put a lot of work into this site and I’m not doing it again.
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Hi. I don’t know if it’s directly related to the new editor but i noticed that the image export from WordPress to Pinterest changed since than. Everytime the image discription, given in wordpress, is gone in the exported pinterest post.
Something more: Sometimes if you edit a article, the editor switched from the new look to the old version.
It would be very nice to enable the top editor toolbar in the html view.Idea: Would be nice to split the left toolbar to the left and right and than give them a fix postion so that you don’t need to scroll up and down for every single change :)
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@teepee12 and others.
Many of us had the same complaints and sentiments last December. The new editor is the logical devolution of the dashboard and stats pages unveiled at the end of 2014. I loathed the Beep editor, but I’d happily take it’s functionality over the mess of the new editor. Fortunately, my father’s site is simple and static, so I shouldn’t have to wade into those waters again.
Several long-time bloggers found that mobile-centric companies had invested heavily in WordPress, which probably played heavily in WP.com’s recent UI changes. I agree that it’s foolish; much of WP.com’s profit comes from upgrades, and I doubt many in the micro-blogging crowd will invest in the (increasingly pricey) upgrades. I used to have several of those upgrades; I cancelled everything except the site-redirect when I left.
Self hosting is cheaper than the premium upgrade, and it’s surprisingly easy to export your WP.com blog. I suspect that many did just that last year, and many more will do it soon.
They’re following the same pattern they did last December—forcing an awful, buggy, and unfinished product on users, all the while crowing about the benefits of the new stats, dashboard, and editor. They’re using us as beta testers on unfinished and poorly implemented products. They seek feedback, admonish us to accept change while assuring us that the old tools will remain. Then they make it progressively more difficult to access those tools.
A simple toggle button for each UI would be easy to implement, but I suspect that their goal is to push us to use the new tools, limited and frustrating as they may be.
As I’ve said before, self-hosting isn’t for everyone, but it’s cheaper than purchasing a premium upgrade here, and the user interface is far easier to use. They aren’t likely to screw it up as badly as they did here because the architecture is different, and the “upgrades” on WP.com would be disastrous for those trying to produce complex, media rich websites. With that being said, WP’s design and business decisions over the past year concern me, but they’d get far more pushback if they changed WP.org’s interface too drastically.
They may be going for pro duct differentiation, but I don’t see why it has to be so drastic, buggy, limited, and haphazardly implemented.
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