Today after many complaints and a lot of feedback which told them nobody wanted this change to occur, WordPress rolled out their new editor.
It is total shite, of course. Looking at the feedback thread, it seems like half the stuff people use on a regular basis does not work, and they have removed the ability for people to easily get back to the old screen they are used to. A quick scan of the support forums shows that some people are Not Happy, Jan.
DO.NOT.WANT.
If you are like me and you DO.NOT.WANT, and you are stuck on wordpress.com, you might want to check out this thread.
Newsflash – people do not enjoy change! The rest of the world knows this, but apparently when you work for WordPress, that one simple fact is removed from your brain. :(
They haven’t rolled out this new editor for self-hosted blogs (yet?), but from looking at the link you provided, at least the option to use photos in a different way (mosaics, circles…) sounds intriguing. What’s wrong with it otherwise?
My biggest issue – they’ve taken everything that was on the right hand side and moved it to the left. *boggle*. Why would you move everything from where people are used to using it? The trouble is, people read from left to right, so now people are constantly reading the menu items which they used to know where they were and go to them when they needed them. A lot of these changes have been done for people using mobiles and tablets – I use my laptop for blog writing and I wouldn’t use those other things for something that important, myself. :)
From what everyone is saying on the support forums – It squishes everything blog related into a very small area on the screen. You can’t put a border around your image, or resize images simply – though me personally I think they should remove the ability to upload super large images and make them smaller because people do not realise, those large images come through on their feed as ENORMOUS.
They have removed the ability to edit in HTML – you can only see the visual editor now. They took spell check away, removed the ability for people to quick link to previous posts, they have changed the text to be in difficult to see colours like blue and grey instead of black, the auto saving feature means the page is constantly trying to save when you type anything.. oh, there is a long, long list.. :) And people are still finding these changes as a surprise and arriving on the support forums to say WTF just happened to my blog?
Worst of all, some of the support staff there are dismissing peoples concerns as “resistance to change” – people don’t like change, that is for sure – but people deeply hate change which is pointless and gives them less features than they had before. :)
I haven’t seen it yet (I’m self-hosted), but the Yoast plugin has done a new update which changed the format quite a lot, was a bit of a pain to navigate for the first time last night :-/
I’ve got a couple of wordpress.com blogs, Janet, and unfortunately I have experienced this new editor plus the beep boop version before it. Both of them are just plain terrible. :/ I do not understand why they would ever want to *remove* functions people use! ;)