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mark kaplun’s blog Looking for even less inspired title Menu and widgets Search for: wordpress answers at stack exchange latest answers It is better UX to manage widgets in the widget admin than in the customizer The drive to push everything into the customizer seems to drive people into a religious type of zeal instead of evaluating technical merits, which bring strange enhancement suggestions like putting an non dismissable warning in the widget admin screen https://core.trac.wordpress.org/ticket/40830 . So maybe a explicit explenation is required why people prefer (sometimes) the widget admin screen over working with the customizer Customizer is slow, widget admin is fast(er). In the widget admin there is no need to load all the JS related information that the customizer needs to be able to manage the other aspects of the page which are unrelated to widgets It requires less clicks to get to the widget admin. To get to the admin only two clicks are required 1. login 2. navigate the menu, while with the customizer you need 1. login 2. go to the front end, 3. click the customize” button, 4. click the widgets” button. No, the customizer short cuts to the specific widget admin are not really faster. In the admin page it requires 2 click to get to the admin page, two more to open the sidebar and the widget, total 4. On the customizer it requires 3 clicks just to get into the customizer mode, then navigate to the page which includes the widget, then locate the widget on the page (in twentyseventeen a lot of scrolling will be required) and only then you get to the promised land. This is not to say that the customizer is a pointless thing, but it for sure do not have good answers for many valid mainstream use cases. It is better to stop the zealotry and improve the widgets admin screen (add revisions to widgets and sidebars, widget duplication and the like) instead of spreading FUD about it. Posted on May 26, 2017 May 26, 2017 Categories Rant , WordPress Tags customize , widgets Leave a comment on It is better UX to manage widgets in the widget admin than in the customizer Sin #4 The (dysfunctional) nanny state All nanny state ideas sound great until you get down to the ways they are being implemented. The manifestation in WordPress is the automatic update” of core/themes/plugins. The notification in the admin panel as if tells you There is a new version just install it, it takes less then a minute, and you will have the latest, greatest, and secutitest (just made up the word). In reality the nanny state promises things that it can not actually check. Does the new version has breaking changes? how was it actually tested to ensure that there are no bugs or security issue? the nanny state just do not know, but still the message is trust me, I know”. No wonder people actually buy into that message, after all most of the wordpress site owners have no knowledge about software development and proper ways to run a test on a testing” site before upgrading production. And what happens when anJust try to imagine this kind of process in any other aspect of life. For example, you want to drive a car? just go and buy one, 5 minute for the credit card transaction to be approved, 5 more minutes to get the keys and sign documents and you can just drive. Learn how the car operates? Driving laws? what for, it takes too much time. Even when you buy a commodity appliance like a laptop you are expected to have some basic understanding in the technical aspects, but the WordPress motto is we serve the lazy and the dumb”. There is nothing wrong with focusing on serving the dumb and lazy, as long as you are always doing the right decisions, and again with the way the internet changes all the time it is just impossible. The problem starts when you do not give them any tool to work with when they actually decide that they do want to understand how it works”. This is why from time to time there is a question on stackexchange about how to secure the login form against brute force attacks, when at least some of the time the people that ask to not even know they have an xml-rpc end point through which they can be attacked. And when you do not even know there is anything to learn you are unlikely to learn it. A sad positive feedback loop. Inspired and helped to articulate feelings into words by this great blog post by @rarst . Posted on May 12, 2017 May 12, 2017 Categories Rant , WordPress Tags The Sins of WordPress Leave a comment on Sin #2 Treating users as technical idiots, and trying to keep them that way Sin #1 Market share is the only thing Sometimes you find yourself at the end of a deep rabbit hole and you ask yourself how did you get there. It is tempting to think that the problem is with you doing a zig while you should have done a zag but rarely you hear people asking what exactly was Alice doing outside by the river with no parental supervision in the first place? It is pointless to discuss several of WordPress sins without understanding why they came about, and why there are not ever likely to get fixed. In the beginning, in the good old days when WordPress was just a blogging platform, it was easy to understand the guiding philosophy – make web publishing easy and accessible to all. This motto worked well and in an era in which you had to have some technical knowledge in order to even buy a domain, it was a major factor in WordPress’s success and in the flourishing of blogging. Then, two things happened, WordPress decided it wants to be more than a niche blogging platform, but an actual CMS, and Facebook (and to lesser extant twitter) came and killed blogging. This caused a shift in perspective, WordPress do not measure itself anymore in how many bloggers use it (that ratio is declining due to people preferring to blog” to their friends on Facebook instead of addressing unknown audience), but in how many installs it has. The problem is that in too many cases quantity and quality do not go hand in hand. It might not be a problem if every decision being made is the right one, but it makes it impossible to change anything for the better if it means that someone’s site will stop functioning. This is true for every type of software but it is even more visible on the web where everything is almost always in a flux. When you claim that 27% of the web is powered by WordPress, and give the ( disputed ) number importance it is very easy to see why you are not going to do something that will annoy about 5% (at this point in time) of your users by doing the right thing and dropping support for the EOLed and generally insecure PHP 5.2. It is actually worse, as with PHP 5.2 there are at least mostly reliable stats on the amount of people that are going be be impacted from a deprecation of support, but there is no usage collection for almost any other feature, and no one dares to suggest changing or even deprecating any of them because the impact is literaly unknown. This leads into the worst kind of stagnation, where even bad decisions has to be preserved. Posted on May 12, 2017 May 12, 2017 Categories Rant , WordPress Tags The Sins of WordPress Leave a comment on Sin #1 Market share is the only thing The Sins of WordPress: Preface I am going to try to enumerate as many of the WordPress sins as possible (maybe to get it off my chest, maybe to have a place to point to when someone asks me what is my beef with WordPress) but it is very important to remember that everything in life needs to be measured in a context, otherwise all you end up with is just a pointless holy rage” which might be cool when you need a reason to burn some adrenaline, but unless you are are religious leader or politician, it is very rarely productive in real life. After all the things are said, the only interesting question for most people is Is it the best tool to do X in terms of ROI or time to market?” and right now for many things the answer is still a Yes”. Posted on May 12, 2017 Categories Rant , WordPress...