Nonsensor.

Why? Because WordPress 2.5 came out, and I pine for Blogsmith every time I use it.

This was supposed to be the be-all, end-all, Mr. fixit version because it changed so much design-wise in the CMS/backend portion. Well, it did change. Let's look at some of the benefits:

• Improved image handling: I won't lie, this is an improvement, and something that we need to work on as well. The biggest improvement is a Flash multi-upload, but I think Blogsmith proves that you can't end there, we've had it for ages but still have work to do.
  Note to all WordPress users: "Full" size does in fact resize your images, to the width defined in wp-includes/media.php. I use the image caption easy plugin, so I need two "full" sizes - one for with captions, one for without. I have to change that setting in that file every time? I'll work on it and see what can be done.
• Better tagging: looks a lot like ours now. But that's ok, with the exception of the auto-complete (really the big thing and we finally got around to it only a short time ago ourselves), we got the interface style from Flickr.
• "Improved" dashboard: Wastes piles of space.The same information, except I can only see some of it without scrolling.
  
• "Improved" post editing screen: Approximately 480 pixels down from the top of your browser viewport lies the top line of content in your WYSIWYG editor. I thought our 300 was bad, and we have a logo and two rows of navigation showing at all times. On my Macbook, I have a hard time blogging because I can see about three lines of content. I could scroll down, sure, but hitting "enter" in your post will re-scroll the page back to the top. Just a frustrating bit of unneccessary nonsense. All of the options, except the publishing options, are underneath the post, which I suppose doesn't technically bother me but why not use all that empty space on the right? I'm not sure I get the reasoning behind that, 2.0's collapsible side boxes were great.
  

I don't mean to insult what are basically my people, and I certainly am not trying to be on a high horse, but WordPress 2.5's CMS was quite obviously designed by "designers" who seemed to be striving for aesthetics rather than useful software. White space is very pleasant to look at, but a calming effect is secondary in my writing environment to the ability to do my writing.

I hope someone out there does a reworking of the back end a la the "Tiger" version from a while back, but frankly a little CSS work isn't gonna hack it. Maybe we'll do it...

If, like me, you weren't at IxDA Interaction '08 in Savannah, you might enjoy this collection of videos from the conference. I've only watched a few so far, and though some skip the slides at seemingly important parts, many are really interesting. I especially liked Doug Bolin of Avenue A | Razorfish's presentation on making the complex help system for Microsoft's Sync, but maybe that's because we've been working on a help system recently as well. [via Thomas Baekdal]