Wordpress

the tyranny of the new and shiny at wordpress

whbeebe8 Comments

I have been using WordPress as my blogging platform of choice since December 2013. Long enough to learn how to use it and to set up what is euphemistically referred to as a “work flow” around it. I’ve been generally happy with it, except when WordPress World Headquarters decides it wants to improve things for the Greater Good. That’s when I get really pissed off at the WordPress marketing droids who think they have to come up with Something Better And Shinier. In the process they wind up chucking out the one real feature I depend on, the “classic editor” for entering posts.

Here’s what greeted me when I navigated to the standard WordPress URL today.

I will admit it looks nice and clean. Not that what was replaced was bad, it certainly wasn’t. But give the worker bees credit for not making it look like crap. But operationally, it’s a different story. So let’s go try to create an entry.

Posts show a cleaner view of all my prior posts. Lots of information is missing, and a lot of white space is wasted for that “cleanish” look that seems to be all the rage. The older view gave me a much denser listing I’m used to quickly scanning through. Note that to add a new post there’s a smallish read button with white text in the upper right. And no dropdown to choose between “classic” and what WordPress wants to fob off on us as so-called modern. Oh dear…

Pretty damn sparse, obviously meant to remove anything that would distract from the process of writing. Except, I have enough mental acuity to ignore all that stuff until and unless I actually needed it, at which point my attention would immediately switch to it.

Here is what I really want to write with.

There’s not much visual difference between my preferred view of doing things and the modern shiny view WordPress would rather have us use. Except for the critical classic editor. I can put up with everything except hiding the one feature I want and need most, which is this editor.

If you’re like me, then you can still get to the classic editor if you create an URL with the following pattern:

https://<your_blog_name>.wordpress.com/wp-admin/post-new.php?classic-editor

For listing your posts and being able to update/re-edit them with the classic editor, there’s this link pattern:

https://<your_blog_name>.wordpress.com/wp-admin/edit.php

I’ve now got a hard link to this page on my web browser to immediate go to it.

Here’s my final word to anybody who might be remotely listening at WordPress: I’ve tried to tell you nicely in the past, so now I’m in full Flaming Asshole Mode: Leave my classic editor the Fuck Alone. I know what I like out here in Florida, and what is best for me, not you over in California. I’m sure I’m not the only one who feels this way, so let me repeat this for myself and all those others who feel the same way:

Leave the Classic Editor the Fuck Alone.

8 thoughts on “the tyranny of the new and shiny at wordpress”

  1. The past week they have inundated me with e-mails to upgrade (i.e. give them money). For what? All they ever do is add on gunk that makes the site worse (Facebook Syndrome). So far Classic Editor is still available through the Admin link. Blockhead Editor is so slow it doesn’t even load on my machine. They need to learn that “new” and “improved” are not synonyms.
    I fully expect the Classic Editor to vanish entirely one day. When it does, so will I. No one will miss the latter, but everyone will miss the former.

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    • I would switch from WordPress, except I now have a large body of “work” that I would want to transfer off of this platform and onto the one I would transfer to. I have no desire to leave anything behind the way I did when I switched from Blogger to WordPress.

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  2. Amen, sir! If it ain’t broke, don’t fix it…I have written about the “push” to the Block(head) Editor in my blog. I may have to dance with the devil (Blogger) to keep blogging if I no longer have a path to the Classic Editor.

    Who thinks that inserting a block to create spacing is easier/more intuitive than hitting the Enter key?! I don’t give a crap about wrapping text around a photo. Hate to be the bearer of bad news, but WordPress has only committed to the Classic Editor through the end of this year.

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    • I figured that Classic Editor’s days were limited. I suppose I better get on the stick and find another place to go with the idea of migrating everything over to there. I have started looking, but the sad thing is that most of the hits are for migrating from Blogger to WordPress. You can export your WordPress blog via XML, to be uploaded elsewhere to another platform that may understand the WordPress XML format.

      One crazy idea: Fork WordPress to get rid of all the new stuff and keep Classic Editor. WordPress has a repo on Github (https://github.com/WordPress/WordPress), so forking the repo would be dead simple. Not only would I remove all the excess, I would work to harden the entire code base, removing support for plugins. Every time I turn around there’s a major security breach across tens of thousands of WordPress sites due to shittily written plugins.

      Another crazy idea: Re-write the PHP engine (PHP is what WordPress is written in) in Rust. This is already happening in another corner of the web; Ryan Dahl, the original author of NodeJS, has created Deno (https://deno.land/), a secure JavaScript runtime written in Rust. I’m using Deno across multiple systems (Intel and Arm), and it does work, and work well. I would call my re-write Pip, which would be a circular acronym for ‘Pip Isn’t PHP,’ or maybe Pirp (pronounced ‘perp’) for ‘Pirp Is Rusty PHP.’

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  4. rulesoflogic — And they may be well beyond me as well. I already have a pretty full plate for a retired guy, and no plan ever survived contact with reality, to wit: browsing the WordPress code repo for five minutes poured immense amounts of cold water on the rosy idea of forking the code base. I may do something about it in the nebulous future, but for the next few months this idea goes on the far end of the back burner. Maybe come June or July I’ll re-examine all of this.

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