molly.com
Thursday 5 January 2006
WordPress 2.0 and Akismet
SO I INSTALLED WP2 and have been working with it for a week or so now. I have to be very honest, while it looks very very pretty coming out of the box, I really want to strip all the admin presentation down and get back to the lean, mean, admin machine WP was prior to the 2.0 release.
Typically not a fan of WYSIWYG editors (imagine that, dear readers!), I figured hey, let me give the new editor a go. While it’s decent, I don’t like it. And if I’m working in Mozilla, which I do on my Win2k server, the damn link popop crashes Moz every time. Crashes MOZ? That never happens.
I want my lean mean WP back.
What WP 2.0 has gained in interface appeal it’s lost in some practicality too. The drop-down menus in the editor are useful but I forget to open them up sometimes and have posted twice without properly categorizing my posts!
I think the most frustrating thing about WP 2.0 is that it is a lot slower than it used to be. I’m not sure if that’s the program itself or my settings, but tweaking WP settings isn’t something I have a lot of time for right now.
I will say this with whole-hearted approval and delight: Akismet is very, very, very good. As many readers know, I went through hell with my spam experiences and comment spam was by far one of the topmost reasons I went to WP. I was very happy for a while, but the spam problem kept getting worse. I was always able to stave it off to a certain point but it took extra time and effort. Akismet has made this last week a dream. It’s an excellent bit of work and I thank everyone who is working on it from the bottom of my poor spam-enticing site.
I’m not sure what next steps should be. I won’t leave WP, no way, not now. But short of spending a few hours remodifying, I’m almost ready to just reinstall the last stable version, which includes Akismet and has none of the overhead. Any advice for me?
Filed under: blogging, software
Posted by: Molly | 7:48 am |
January 5th, 2006 at 8:14 am
You can disable the WYSIWYG in your user preferences. Just go to “Users” and at the bottom there’s a “Personal Options” section, and just uncheck the “Use the visual rich editor when writing” box and save. You’ll have your old WP post box back.
January 5th, 2006 at 8:19 am
I have yet to upgrade to 2.0, I don’t have the fastest of machines so all this drag and drop stuff would probably kill it. Akismet is very very sexy, allthough now I have another WordPress blog, er, great.
January 5th, 2006 at 8:28 am
I’ve heard great things about Askimet, but I’ve had tremendous success with SpamKarma 2 as a spam defender:
http://unknowngenius.com/blog/wordpress/spam-karma/
What I;ve heard is that Askimet is dependent on others having been ID-ing spam for you; so new strains may get through, espesically if you are a high profile target.
There is an SK2 plugin that allows Askimet to work together.
I don;t care much about the web editor as I do all my postings in ecto:
http://ecto.kung-foo.tv/
that allows me to do all composition, previewing, etc before even bouncing to the server. It rocks.
January 5th, 2006 at 8:46 am
I agree. There isn’t that much difference between WP1.5 and WP2 but apparently there’s still a lot more changes to come.
As for Askimet, I can’t quite work that one now.
Im about to upload my new version of ZachInglis.com with WP2 and a new style etc
January 5th, 2006 at 9:56 am
While the WYSIWYG editor hasn’t caused Firefox to crash on my PowerBook (I haven’t posted yet from my XP Pro machine), the link pop-up is very slow. The WYSIWYG em, strong, and strikethough elements haven’t worked for me at all.
I usually post from Ecto, so I’m not really concerned enough to disable WYSIWYG just yet. I have to admit that Ecto gives me validation errors on multi-paragraph blockquotes, so I usually end up editing the HTML in the WP admin anyway.
January 5th, 2006 at 10:29 am
I downloaded the Askimet standalone thing for my WP 1.5 blog, and it kept nuking with PHP parse errors.
I haven’t gone to WP2, although I *really* want all the built-in spam protection, as I spent ages getting the Kubrick theme to be accessible under WCAG (out of the box it doesn’t make priority 1) and I’m not so anxious to do it all again …
January 5th, 2006 at 10:31 am
I’m a liar - Kubrick on WP1.5 does make WCAG priority 1, but no higher.
January 5th, 2006 at 10:44 am
After a few moments playing around with my “Write Post” page of the WordPress Administration Panel, I found that I can open up the “Category” drop down and it stays open when I come back to it later. Drop down lists apparently does not always close by default, which is probably a good thing for you with trying to leave the “Category” drop down list open so you won’t forget about them.
January 5th, 2006 at 11:02 am
I’ve had just the opposite experience — I have Wordpress 2.0 and K2 running on my site and it seems much, much faster to me. I turned off the WYSIWYG editor right out of the box — I hate it. It may be good for folks who don’t know HTML but to me it’s just a huge pain to toggle back and forth between the two.
It was much easier for me to customize the design and I really, really like creating categories on the fly. On my wish list: Being able to re-categorize posts as a group after I’ve created a new category.
January 5th, 2006 at 11:05 am
Even though I’m not a big fan of the the blue, there is a lot to like in the new WP interface, especially the ability to upload without opening a new tab.
Steve, I know it seems obvious, but you just made my morning a little brighter with that tip.
January 5th, 2006 at 11:06 am
Molly, is it primarily the editor you’ve got a problem with? The ‘pods’ should detect the state you left them in (in theory).
I’m very interested in any complaints you have, as I’m working on Shuttle, the update to the admin, of which a few of the things in 2.0 originate, and we’re working on a full implementation for 2.1. So the more you can tell me about what you think is wrong, the easier it is for me to help you fix it
January 5th, 2006 at 11:54 am
Maybe it’s Akismet that doesn’t like my name
As for WP2, I’m still running the old version. Haven’t found the time to upgrade yet. But reading your post makes me wonder if I shouldn’t wait for a quicker, less buggy version to come out.
January 5th, 2006 at 1:15 pm
“What I’ve heard is that Askimet is dependent on others having been ID-ing spam for you; so new strains may get through, espesically if you are a high profile target.”
This is one aspect of the weighting in Akismet, a strong one as there are now more than 60k blogs running it but we also run hundreds of other tests.
Molly, glad to hear Akismet is working well for you. I actually had you in mind when I was first writing the service.
The interface of WP2 is still a work in progress, fine folks like Michael are working really hard on it. Thanks for your feedback.
January 5th, 2006 at 1:46 pm
Not really sure I should post this comment after Michael’s and Matt’s comments, so let me first say that I’m a satisified WordPress user.
I’ve read from multiple sources that people just don’t seem happy with the performance in 2.0, so I think I’ll wait for a while. Besides, WordPress 1.5 works just fine for me for the moment.
Regarding comments and spam: recently I’ve gotten loads and loads with comment spam and while Akismet seemed interesting, I wanted to have the local control of it myself. So, I’m with Alan: Spam Karma 2.0 does the trick for me. At least for now.
January 5th, 2006 at 2:05 pm
I also have to be honest and say I found the 2.0 release to be somewhat anticlimatic.
January 5th, 2006 at 6:44 pm
….and people wonder why I put up with Blogger’s shortcomings
I’ll probably eventually crack and enter the world of maintaining a blog application myself, but for now I’ll let people at Blogger worry about that.
January 5th, 2006 at 6:59 pm
I had FF1.5 crashing on my powerbook every time I tried to use the pop up HTML editor in WP2 but that is not my big concern.
My problem with WP2 was the WYSIWYG editor converting unicode, I would type – the first time I save it would be converted to – the second time I save it would be converted to an en-dash (aka –). Real fun when you are trying to post code examples on your blog.
You need to turn off the WYSIWYG editor in user preferences and make sure you press apply, because with Safari 1.3 at least there is no difference in appearance in the editor between WYSIWYG on or off.
I like what is going on under the hood with WP2 and will be moving up to WP2 shortly.
January 5th, 2006 at 8:48 pm
[…] First Molly goes on a mild rant about WordPress 2.0, and then I discover that my trusty RSS reader, Vienna, has mysteriously decided to quit working right. No idea why, but it suddenly refuses to update any feeds from blogs.msdn.com, which means I’ve been missing out on Old New Thing et al. for over a week now. I think I’ll look at NetNewsWire/NewsGator/WhateverTheHeckItIsNow. […]
January 5th, 2006 at 10:22 pm
I’ve had the advanced WYSIWYG editor disabled as well; prefers typing codes instead, really.
January 6th, 2006 at 3:38 am
Not yet upgraded my own blog to 2.0 but have it running on a different site and it is marginally slower.
I’m surprised that there aren’t more “admin hacks” though.. I know of the Tiger Admin interface, and the “slim admin” (which removes a lot of the feeds) but beyond that…
Although I do find it incredible that WordPress is ALREADY running into the Advanced/Basic UI issues that all software apps hit.
January 6th, 2006 at 3:39 am
I was abut to upgrade; now I’m a little hesitant
I’m running the “lean, mean” version and I think it’s the best thing since sliced cheese! Thanks for your post.
January 6th, 2006 at 8:40 am
Hey Molly and a Happy New Year to you!
Thanks for the advice, very useful as I’m a fellow WP buddy. Was wizzing along fine for a month or so before the spam started to kick in (Damn Spammers!). My firewall at work is as ever doing what it does best at blocking all the useful sites I want to look at so I can’t get into Akismet but I’ll be sure to check it out over the weekend.
By the way, do you fancy doing me a favour when you are up in Newcastle and maybe do a talk on Web Standards for the NEUA as well as maybe meeting up with the Newcastle New Media Group? I know I’d also spoken to Ian Forrester who was keen to come up to the North East and it’d be good to meet up with you guys again. I’ll drop you a line anyhow.
Take Care
January 6th, 2006 at 8:41 am
Ooops, so I missed my closing tag out somewhere. Sorry
January 7th, 2006 at 9:51 am
My upgrade has uncovered similar annoyances, mainly with the WYSIWYG interface. while the link button doesn’t entirely crash my FF 1.5, the window it brings up is so tiny that I cannot see the text. My second problem is the the WYSIWYG editor won’t resize on width. Because I often use WP with two windows side-by-side this was a big problem. The third annoyance is that when you paste from an outside source, the WYSIWYG retains that source’s formatting — No thanks! The last thing I want is some text on my post in arial while other sections are in times. Thats what CSS was supposed to be for.
That said, when I switched to the non-WYSIWYG editor, these problems went away. I can still use WP pretty much the way I used to. The only remaining problem is that it is still slow to post, despite their advertisement that they had eliminated the post lag. Because I have multiple blogs, I believe that the problem is related to the number of posts you have. My blog with only a few posts is lightning fast, but the one with over a thousand takes about a minute and then brings up a blank page instead of a write page.
January 7th, 2006 at 7:07 pm
Wrong link to the spam plugin: http://akismet.com/
January 8th, 2006 at 5:36 am
Askimet is good, very good. I haven’t a bad word to say about it so far. It hasn’t chewed up any legitimate comments yet and 15 days before automatically deleting is a reasonably long enough time I think. What’s lovely is not getting an e-mail everytime I get a spam comment. Nice.
I don’t mind the WYSISYG editor I believe it uses AJAX(if it doesn’t use AJAX then it certaintly reminds me of it) and I like it. You can drag the editing box around, great stuff. The biggest drawback for me is the virtual rich editor, what a total pain in the a**, it’s going to be permantently switched off. But I can see that WP users that are not so code or markup orientated shall we say, will appreciate it I’m sure.
Bruce: What I did was take a copy of my modified Kubrick theme and just copy it back onto my server. I didn’t encounter any problems.
January 8th, 2006 at 1:02 pm
My biggest peeve about 2.0 has been the image posting. If you don’t want to use a thumbnail, it will give you the option to use the original, which is what I want, however, it posts the original with the thumbnail dimensions! Who would want to do that?
January 8th, 2006 at 6:48 pm
I changed from Textpattern to Wordpress, they both could learn allot of each other, it would be great if there could be sections like Textpattern, that would make Wordpress a great CMS but not a bCMS
January 9th, 2006 at 9:34 am
Davezilla, this latest changes in inline-uploading.php file in the admin folder will fix your problem.
It gets rid of the image dimension when you choose original mode.
http://trac.wordpress.org/changeset/3407
January 9th, 2006 at 1:52 pm
[…] Looks like Wordpress 2 is not meeting with universal approval. Unlike Molly, I am such a newbie to Wordpress that I doubt the upgrade will change my life much, so I think I will bite the bullet and update soon. First I just have to back up my huge archive of half a dozen posts… […]
January 10th, 2006 at 5:06 am
I would say roll back to the previous version.
I’ve not used WordPress in a while - since I wrote my own blogging script - but I had to install and customise it for my partner this past weekend and even with the WYSIWYG/automatically correct xhtml options turned off, it was still interfering with perfectly valid code and making it non-valid which is a MAJOR problem in my eyes.
I’m not impressed, and actually glad that I don’t rely on it for my own website.
January 11th, 2006 at 6:10 am
Hi Molly,
I use Wordpress on my site (not my blog, but collects alot of traffic) and i have the same spam problem, day in day out spam posts. I havent upgraded to 2.0 yet, since i wanted to read this post first (done that). But just to back up Alan above.. Spam Karma 2 or SK2 is definetely done my site wonders, it has caught 100% of spam so far. So i def recommend using it for the spam woes. I tried to check out the http://www.aksimet.com/ site but it kept on timing out?
Just my 2 pence.
January 12th, 2006 at 9:37 am
I agree with you concerning WP2. I much preferred the admin controls in WP1.5 to this. The drop down menus are very pretty to look at but I always forget to open them. There is an option to switch back from the WYSIWYG editor in one of the options, but I can’t remember it off the top of my head.
January 15th, 2006 at 1:18 am
Hey Molly,
Just to be contrary, have you looked at Textpattern lately? It is about as lean and mean as they get.
By the way, good to have you in Albuquerque this week!
January 17th, 2006 at 1:20 am
I’ve never used WP prior to WP 2, but I’m quite pleased with it. I’ve been using it on my web site for about 3 weeks now.
January 26th, 2006 at 10:00 am
I enjoyed your site and look forward to more.
March 1st, 2006 at 12:31 pm
I like the concept- “personality site”. Nice color scheme.
March 10th, 2006 at 4:12 pm
I agree - there’s always a tradeoff with making an interface “easier” and clunkier at the same time, and usually results in making too many things “auto” that you want “manual” control over. At least there are workarounds for most issues but the speed is definitely a problem for me, too.
March 24th, 2006 at 1:01 pm
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September 3rd, 2006 at 1:46 am
[…] Wordpress 2.0.4: Any reason not to go with the latest version? I agree that the admin is a bit bloated, but I think within 2 days I’ve used pretty much all options there are except import. […]
December 18th, 2006 at 12:21 pm
[…] It was with the best intentions that the rich text editor was added in to the latest WordPress release, currently 2.0.5. Unfortunately many people, especially long-time WordPress users, have found it to be lacking. They missed the “lean, mean, admin machine” that WP was. The rich text editor disallows easy insertion of YouTube videos and other embedded media. It also tends to be slow loading even on fast Internet connections and fast computers. Additionally, superfluous code can slide under the radar and make it into your live posts and pages really really easily. In short, it’s much easier, faster and infinitely more useful to disable the rich text editor in WordPress. […]
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