Has WordPress Lost it’s Way?

Wordpress 2.1 is out, hot on the heels of 2.0.7. The much-anticipated (by some) new version includes a breathtaking plethora of features that makes me (again) suspect WordPress is really starting to lose it’s way. Let’s run thru them, shall we?

An autosave feature;
Tabbed switching between the horrible WYSIWYG and traditional editor;
Somehow improved import/export functionality;
A “search engine privacy feature”;
A SEO-riffic rehash of the static front-page plugin;
A supposedly improved MySQL query system, to better support database caching;
More blogroll functionality;
A “redesigned login screen”;
“More AJAX” - enough said;
Improved functionality for pages;
Some vague admin and dashboard improvements;
An enlarged comment feed;
Improved internationalization;
An upload manager;
and “much much more”.

Aside from the internationalization and improved language support, potential side-effects of the database query “improvements”, and (arguably) the comment feed changes (I hesitate to call it an enhancement), none of these changes do anything to improve the experiences of blog readers and visitors. It’s almost entirely added functionality for site owners, and enhancement of some of the most “dumbed-down” features - like the horrendous visual editor, and the uploader.

Autosaving work in progress is potentially useful, but I have my doubts how well it’s going to work in actual use. As far as tabbed editing - anything that makes it easier to get away from the visual editor is okay in my book, I guess. Import-export functionality? Was that really an area that needed improvement? Not as far as I’d noticed. The “search engine privacy” thing is evidently an idiot-friendly implementation of robots.txt directives, and I have a feeling is only going to be confusing for the technologically less-literate. The static front page option is clear pandering to the CMS market; duplicating this popular plugin in the base code might be a sign of a new direction to come for WordPress. Hopefully they’ll think thrice before concentrating on the ever-changing quackery of SEO.

This is at least the third round of “improved” MySQL code WordPress has introduced; I have my doubts how well it’s going to perform compared to 2.0.x, let along 1.5.x, and doubt WP-Cache2 is going to disappear from the internet anytime soon.

Enhanced - or “busier” - blogrolls are one of the few features visible to visitors; perhaps people who care about blogrolling will get excited, but I’m unimpressed. Is there something wrong with the old login screen? Functionality before form, right? Whatever.

Ajaxturbation is going to be the death of WordPress, mark my words. It’s trying too hard to be too trendy, in my view, and the performance penalty outweights any of the underwhelming eye candy it provides.

Making pages more like posts - combined with the static front-page features - helps to make the distinction between pages and posts less and less meaningful. No word on whether the default site search will now search pages, of course - that’d be useful for visitors, after all.

Admin and dashboard improvements? I bet ten quatloos they do nothing to improve the speed of the dashboard. I’m undecided on whether syndicating all comments is a good idea; most significantly, for a lot of sites, that’s going to be a huge feed, gobbling bandwidth like crazy in a largely-duplicative and ever-growing siphon. Internationalization is always good, but I have my doubts what the new and improved language-handling is going to do for code size and speed. Call me cynical, but it’s true.

Improving the upload functionality, in my mind, strays even further from traditional blog territory, and is targeted either at the technologically-challenged (in which case, is adding idiot-friendly tools really a good idea?) and the CMS crowd (I expect there’s much overlap between the two groups, myself).

Most bloggers, I would say, spend far less time on their sites than their visitors do. It’s the visitors whose experience should be most important. Adding features that only impact blog authors and developers is sort of masturbatory - especially when they have the potential to worsen the experience of readers, either by hampering performance metrics directly or impairing popular plugins that provide added value to visitors.

Obviously, adding gee-whiz buzzword features to WP is a decision engineered to endear the software to blog authors, the people with the choice of what backend they use for their sites. For the last couple new releases, though - security improvements, not to be overlooked, aside - WP has been offering up the same old four-cylinder compact, just encrusted with more bling. They’ve added chrome, and HD radio, and keyless entry, and tinted the windows, and bolted on a spoiler to impress the owner and stroke his or her ego - but not added sound-proofing, a better engine, stronger shocks, a leather interior, air conditioning, airbags - or anything else to improve the experience of riders.

Has WordPress lost it’s way? Not yet, I don’t think. But they’re straying further and further from their roots; instead of offering meaningful improvements for bloggers and readers, they’re trying to make WP more attractive, out of the box, to the CMS and SEO markets. I’m just afraid that by the time WP 5.0 rolls around, a basic install is going to take 75MB of space, page loads are going to be measured in whole seconds, and there will be all sorts of flashy non-improvements included that pander to whatever’s the big overhyped trend then - Web 4.0, perhaps, AJAXTMLScript, iFlash, or something similarly potentially stupid.

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