Wordpress 2.9 - the votes are in

The Wordpress site has just released the results of the survey on media features for Wordpress 2.9.

While the results are complicated, and best looked at right there, what I found intriguing was the number of features people found desirable, and the dilemma about including them in the core, distributing them with the core release as cannon plugins, or developing cannon plugins but keeping them in the repos for optional download.

The strength of Wordpress is its sleek efficiency, which will not remain so sleek, if things keep getting added to it, and the package keeps bulking up. Not everyone uses every feature, obviously. Most bloggers don't need exotic media stuff to blog. Yet, who would dispute that it would be fabulous to have the ability to work with media more efficiently? I dare say many bloggers will begin using it once they find it available by default.

Also, the more things added to the main distro, the more complicated it will be in terms of continued development, testing, updating..... that much more code to wade through, compatibility to ensure and functionality to be tested before each release. It is going to hold meaning in terms of manpower and skilled resources.

Its an interesting dilemma - functionality, but how? Increased function, or minimum bulk and high efficiency.... will be interesting to see how the decision flows.

Pinging update in the new Wordpress

I just came across this post by Thord Daniel Hedengren where he speaks with quite a bit of outrage about a change Wordpress has made in their pinging code which he discovered in a post by Christian Bolstad. Basically, for the less techno-savvy (and for me) what it means, is that earlier, when you published a post, Wordpress used to ping (inform) various places that keep track of the content on your blog about the update. This took time, which directly translated into waiting time while your post was published. Now, what it does is publishes your post, and pings separately in about an hours time.

Thord is of the opinion that this causes some damage to his site being indexed fast enough. It may be true. Who knows? What I found so strange was that he seems disproportionately angry about the whole thing. Part of his anger is about the nature of response from Denis de Bernardy which he has quoted, where Denis seems dismissive about his concern and makes a valid point that its difficult to get people accountable when they aren't being paid, so if information on this change was not present in the documentation, it is likely to be an ommission because it didn't seem like a big deal, rather than a deliberate secret (which doesn't make sense in an open-source project :D) and he suggested that Thord put it in the documentation if it matters so much to him.

While it isn't such a big deal for me, I find it fascinating to see the kinds of things bloggers find threatening to their online well-being. "Putting the real time web to a halt", "Tells no one" is quite an extreme way of putting this scenario (is it only me who thinks it reads like its implying a deliberate conspiracy?). Your site is updated, services accessing your feed see the change immediately, and its only the notification of the change that is delayed. Have some perspective. To his credit, Thord has submitted a counter patch for this change.

I honestly hadn't thought that it would matter. I was not aware that the delayed ping will do much damage to my blog. Still don't think so. Perhaps because my blog isn't one that gets updated within hours. I don't see the big issue for me at the moment, considering that its only the notification getting delayed and regular access to the feed is up to date - at least that's how it is on my blog. My feed is showing correctly immediately.

On the other hand, with a large list of services to ping, I see the value in separating it from the regular posting in the interest of efficiency.

So to me, it looks like people want different things from something as simple as a publish button. I can't figure out the great deal if a publish button doesn't ping automatically for me. Afterall, it doesn't do many other things for me which make a difference to my site as well. It publishes, which is the main thing, and I am happy that it publishes more efficiently.

It may just be me, but I'm actually happy about this change,. as I often end up publishing, reading my post, editing, publishing the edit and so on a couple of times before I'm completely satisfied. I always worry that I may get penalized by the pinging services for 'ping spamming' if there is such a term. But there wasn't much I could do about it. Now, I can edit for an hour, go back and forth, and it gets pinged when its ready.

I like this.

Wordpress 2.8.1 Editor Problems?

Symptoms:

1. You upgrade your wordpress. Things are good
2. Suddenly, you go to make a new post, or edit an existing one, and voila, it opens with html code.
3. So you click on the 'visual' tab, of course.
4. Nothing whatsoever happens.

Other symptoms -

1. White text on white background - its there, just not visible.
2. Tough to upload/edit images
3. Tough to assign tags
4. Some issue with moving widgets around.....
   

Everybody and his cousin knew that there was a problem with the text editor in 2.8.0. You have gone from 2.8.0 to 2.8.1. surely this is not happening to you?

So what has really happened? My suspicion is that since they took out the fancy editor in 2.8.1, for some reason, your broswer cache lets it seem to work for a while longer than it actually does, so when it finally clears and you don't have it anymore, you don't even think of the update, since it had seemed to work since then.

What you have lost is just the fancy editor.

Never fear, when this nerd in progress is here!

Do so:

1. Upgrade your Firefox - for some reason, I observed that wherever people having this problem spoke about their browsers, there was mention of outdated versions of firefox. Wondered if they were linked for quite a while before giving it a shot - it worked. Didn't solve the problem completely, but it was much better, and I was then able to solve it easily.
2. You will now be able to see clearly where you stand with this. You will notice the difference between the html and visual views, and both will function, though without the editor - so you have one with bbcode kind of mark up and html.
3. Install the FCKEditor plugin.
   
4. Done.