I’m logging in earlier this evening to approve a comment, and double-check a few settings that I wanted to change in WordPress, and on my dashboard, I see “In the Trunk“, coming from boren.nu.

Of course, being the kind of person who usually grabs WordPress from Subversion instead of the release tarballs, I go to have a look.

Before I continue, I should mention:

• I’ve had to use a ‘dirty hack’ (read: an outright file replacement of a core file that is guaranteed to be overwritten almost EVERY TIME I upgrade WordPress) to get Atom 1.0 support for Eau Salée Lunaire.
• I’ve been AdBlocking this new AutoSave script that WordPress uses while writing my entries. I don’t really like it, and would rather be able to just flip a switch to kill it.
• I like, and I dislike all the AJAXy features being added in to WordPress. While it’s nice to be able to reorganize the bar to the right of my entry box, to get things put in the sequence I like them (cats on the top and expanded, post slug underneath and expanded, post status following that, with the rest of the stuff folded, because I almost never use these and wouldn’t object to hiding at least the post timestamp when composing a new entry), and it’s nice to be able to reorganize the Sidebar widgets in a convenient way… There is still room for things to be desired.

I go to read this list, and find myself ticking off on my fingers every thing that I’m thinking about the new trunk changes:
* TinyMCE 2.0.9
– I’ll switch that off in a heartbeat in my profile. Raw XHTML or bust.

* Prototype 1.5.0
* script.aculo.us 1.7.0
* jQuery 1.1.1
– Lovely shiny AJAXy things. Will they make WordPress work faster? I’m living in a cloud of doubt, but we’ll hope.

* WP XML-RPC API (WP-specific API for working with pages, authors, and categories)
– I’m hoping to see an explanation of this, since I’m not entirely sure what this happens to be.

* Atom 1.0 Feeds
– IT’S ABOUT DAMN TIME! (I actually said this one out loud. Very loud.)

* Atom Publishing Protocol support
– Won’t affect me adversely. I don’t have any clients that I use for this, and I doubt I’ll even find a client worth my time to use for it, either.

* Better MySQL UTF-8 support
– Yay!

* User cache streamlining
* Improved options caching
– Caching sounds good, especially when it works.

* Plugin sandboxing
– “O RLY?” I’d love something like that. YEARS AGO. There are plenty of broken plugins out there that won’t work for everyone. One might have a hidden PHP5 dependency. Another might require a blood sacrifice gained from a smashed coffee cup to the forehead.

What bothered the hell out of me on this whole list is, there’re two things that should have been implemented no later than WordPress 2.0, and one that should have followed right up or been on the list for 2.0, and yet these things won’t hit the table until WordPress 2.2.

Atom 1.0 should have been a major priority for WordPress, if they are such a major blogging/cms platform. After all, just how long ago did they deprecate Atom 0.3? (Here’s a hint: Mid-September 2006 = 1 year.)
It’s bad form, and a bold lie to claim that “WordPress is a state-of-the-art semantic personal publishing platform with a focus on aesthetics, web standards, and usability” (quote taken directly from wordpress.org homepage) when it takes SEVENTEEN MONTHS to get Atom 1.0 FINALLY into svn trunk!
I can understand a month, to give them time to solidify any other changes they might want to offer, but seventeen?
How much longer do the regular end users have to wait to even get this particular development!?

While we’re AJAXing up the place, it’d be nice to have a built-in mouse-over menu for all the stuff at the top, rather than relying on userland fixes (plugins) for this.

For users who have numerous plugins installed that offer options, or a small number of long-named plugins (Google Analytics, CC Content License being a pair of long-named ‘offenders’), clicking on “Options” and waiting for it to show that list of plugins is a bit slow, and not so friendly on the screen real estate. My monitor is 1280 x 960 pixels. I run with my fonts slightly larger to help my eyes, since I read text on screen all day. The result is, with the number of plugins I have, on top of the general Options that come with WordPress, the options bar actually wraps over to two lines. Aesthetically, it does not make any sense.

With all the nifty slide-a-block, fold-a-block AJAX that’s been thrown into WordPress, one would hope that they would actually add something that can prove itself to be genuinely useful, and add a toggle switch for those who could care less.
As much as I like being able to reorganize the bar of crap to the right of my post here in the WP Admin center, I do this perhaps once every few months! The order of these blocks could have been set on the options page, allowing me to set it and forget it, going on with my day to day life.
This is the kind of stuff that makes me miss the old admin interface — the one without alll of this browser-based detergent.

I have the distinct feeling that I will be adding to this in the future, once I feel like ranting on what else in WordPress is making me hate it.