WordPress 2.0 – Early Review

As noted yesterday, Mark Jaquith upgraded OTB to WordPress 2.0 over the weekend.

There are some good features to it but the most obvious change is the WYSIWYG editor. So far, I absolutely hate it. I haven’t quite given up on it but it is far more cumbersome than the old editor and it auto-inserts seemingly random code that takes longer to fix than if I’d just typed it in HTML to begin with.

Update: To clarify, the antecedent in “I absolutely hate it” is “the WYSIWYG editor,” not “WordPress 2.0.”  While OTB continues to be quite sluggish for reasons we’ve yet to isolate, the new setup is faster and more elegant than its predecessors and the other new features will make the switch worthwhile even if I abandon the new editor.

FILED UNDER: Blogosphere, OTB History, Uncategorized,
James Joyner
About James Joyner
James Joyner is Professor and Department Head of Security Studies at Marine Corps University's Command and Staff College. He's a former Army officer and Desert Storm veteran. Views expressed here are his own. Follow James on Twitter @DrJJoyner.

Comments

  1. Aaron says:

    I agree on the RTE editor. It does suck. Except for inserting images. It adds a nice interface for that.

  2. Dave Wissing says:

    I just switched over teh weekend and got so fed up with the Rich Text Editor that I had to turn it off.

    I do like the feature of adding categories as you are posting.

  3. bryan says:

    I’m no fan of wysiwyg editors to begin with. I do, however, like the changes they’ve made to the backend.

  4. Jim Durbin says:

    I have noticed a lot of former Movable Type sites getting sluggish with age.

    I wonder if the databases that archive any of the blog softwares aren’t really equipped for thousands and thousands of posts.

  5. James Joyner says:

    I wonder if the databases that archive any of the blog softwares aren’t really equipped for thousands and thousands of posts.

    I think there may be something to that, Jim. I’m not sure if there’s a fix for it, in that I want my archives to be searchable and whatnot.

  6. Zelda says:

    I also have upgraded to WordPress 2.0, and I agree that the Rich Text Editor stinks. It really does insert random lines of code which mess things up. But once I got rid of it, everything was fine.

    In terms of OTB being sluggish, I’ve been told that it’s normal, with blogging software like WordPress and Expression Engine, for the database to fragment over time. So what you’ll want to do is log into your cpanel and then go into your MySQL database and click on the option to defragment your database.

    Another thing that has slowed my blog down was listing too many blog pinging services in the Options menu. If you just limit it to Pingomatic, you should be ok.

    Hope this helps you.

  7. James Joyner says:

    Thanks, Zelda.

    I’m guessing Mark did the defrag when he converted, but I can ask him.

    Pingomatic is all I have–although I used to also ping blogrolling.com and weblogs.com as a backup.