WordPress got pretty awesome

I’ve spent a few evenings tinkering with WordPress of late, tidying up my blog and doing a bit of spring cleaning. During that time I’ve been super impressed with how good standard WordPress has become. I’ve spent the last seven-ish years noodling away in theme builders; mainly Divi, and only recently realised there was a new theme editor (beta) built into vanilla WordPress. I gotta say, it’s pretty awesome.

The usual sites I build are a lot more complex than I would ever build for personal use, so it’s been an absolute joy to strip everything back and have fun noodling away on my own little minimalist blog space. I’m not building from scratch mind you, instead I’m using a beautifully minimal theme designed by the incredibly talented Anders Norén, which I’ve been tweaking in subtle ways to suit my needs and visual preferences. Doing so using the new theme editor has been a fun challenge as it’s an entirely different beast than before, but in a really good way.

It’s a simple system, albeit it a little unintuitive at first. I think it could benefit from a few UX and UI tweaks here and there, if just for those of us that have decades long WordPress habits to unlearn. For example, muscle memory had me searching for things in all the wrong places, but once I got used to everything it made a lot of sense, and I could do some powerful things without the need for an all singing, all dancing add-on like Divi. Other than that, it’s a great system. Of course it helps when you’re starting with such an elegant theme as this by Andres. Hat’s off.

I’ve also been playing around with Apple Shortcuts to automate image edits for the blog, using a shortcut to resize, compress, convert to JPEG, and save an image to iCloud, so I can easily queue up photos and feature images. Anything to make the blogging process as frictionless as possible. It’s nerdy, and it works a treat; I love it.

This interest in the new features, plus a recent podcast episode of Decoder featuring WordPress co-founder and CEO (of parent company Automattic) Matt Mullenweg, has sent me down a Matt rabbit hole. This included watching the WordPress State of the Word 2022 keynote, which is a great watch if you’re an open web geek / WordPress fan. It’s got me even more fired up to blog often, which is a state of mind I get into whenever I find myself with some free time; usually over the festive period.

Note to self, make time!

(This is doubly important, considering I’ve read the book of the same name 🙈)

So yeah, I’m making more time for blogging, while reading less about Twitter’s ongoing implosion under the Musk dictatorship. I’m looking forward to more tinkering over the festive period.

🎅🏼

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2 responses

  1. bavatuesdays avatar
    bavatuesdays

    This may be unpopular, but I have to say the latest version of WordPress with the full site editor and Gutenberg is probably the ugliest Frankenstein creation I have seen in all my years of WordPress fandom. I have retreated from them with the classic WYSWYG editor and TwentyTen theme, so I have effectively remained 12 years behind 🙂 That said, I think the latest WP developments have managed to place themselves in the odd position of being really, really hard for a noob and not nearly as elegant and useful as the market they are competing with, namely Squarespace and their like.

    They seem to be directly appealing to site designer and wanna-be PHP programmers rather than focusing on getting anyone who wants to get online quick and easy with a simple theme and a powerful editor. Which has always been their bread and butter. Maybe this is a push to get more people on wp.com? But with the standalone, self-hosted version it’s like you have to have a degree to do the most basic of theme design and post editing with this latest version, and while it is good for many folks who have a deep understanding of web design and how WordPress works, it would be a total nightmare for anyone coming to this tool without it. I can’t imagine showing the latest version of WP to a class or faculty member without real pushback.

    In fact, it has pushed me to play more with other tools like Ghost, which return the writing process back to a very clean, elegant experience that make it not only easier to manage, but more enjoyable overall. I have been a huge proponent of WordPress for over 15 years now, but I have to say their decisions for the last 5-7 years have really been bizarre to me, and I can’t see it getting much better moving forward. Some folks who are essentially programmers will disagree, but that is simply because they see WordPress as the most fully featured coding framework on the web rather than the simple, powerful publishing platform it once was. Where’s the power to the people, Alex?!

    Reply
    1. Alex Masters avatar
      Alex Masters

      That’s a great point Jim. For a noob it’s no doubt a daunting task to tame the beast that is WordPress. I personally think the editor is better now than the pure php editing system it has replaced, but it’s still quite unintuitive. They seem a little stuck between a total reimagining of the admin experience and sticking to the traditional system. They can’t do both as they are now, I think it’s the worst of both worlds at the moment, but I also can’t see them shifting away from that classic admin experience that’s been the same for umpteen years.

      As for the block editor, I like it, but again, sticking with the traditional WordPress sidebar and jamming all the settings in nested menus is not nice at all.

      I think to give power to the people, they should maybe make a simpler WordPress product, something like Medium where you just sign up and type, but an open and federated platform. Cater for both ends of the spectrum. If you want more control, you can level up to full wp.com, then if you want full control, you can go self-hosted and get into some deeper web dev stuff.

      Or maybe this is where we step in and build what they won’t. 😁

      Reply

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