Well, WordPress has Struck Again

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Apparently they decided that being able to flip back and forth between the original “classic” editor style and the new and improved block editor is too much to support, so everything has to start and stay in block editor. Among other things, it means going back to edit posts written in part with the classic editor function is nigh unto impossible without a fair amount of handwavium and irritation (on my side. I’m sure there’s a quick fix on the other side of the display).

Among other things that seem to have gone away is the Read More bar, which allowed me to post small excerpts on the screen, so that more posts could appear on the front page. I find that absence most irritating, because I don’t like having to scroll through a wall-o-text, and I suspect my readers are similar. Nor do I like having everything out in the open if people are not interested in a topic or if there is salty language or mature ideas in something.

The “new” editor was apparently designed for commercial or graphics heavy blogs where you have chunks of text and lots of images, with links to pages. That doesn’t suit my needs all that well, but right now I have to balance, time, money, and what have you.

So, I’ll adapt, and I apologize for walls-of-text and other things, until I can figure out how to work around these improvements.

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25 thoughts on “Well, WordPress has Struck Again”

    • Yeah, just when I’ve learned the tricks I need to make version X.2 work the way I need it to, along comes version X.3 and not only have they moved some of the menus I need, they’ve dropped features I use all the time, and “automated” others that just get in the way, all to make “user friendly.” I’m talking about you MS Word.

      • I spent about a decade doing software maintenance/support for embedded systems (the computer that HAVE toworkso you do NOT notice that you are using a computer…) and Rule One of the User Interface was “No matter how crap the User Interface.. Thou Shalt NOT Money with the user Interface…. with ONE (1) exception. If the end-user sees the change as a HUGE WIN, then AND ONLY THEN, may you even begin to contemplate the possibility of thinking about maybe changing things… and EVEN THEN…*only* as the end-user sees fit. That is: Will changing the default from ‘YES’ to ‘NO’ *PREVENT A DATA/SETTINGS DESTROYING CRASH*? THAT is a *WIN*. EVERYTHING else (unless in s specific ‘OPTIONS’ menu where Most Mortals NEED NOT and Must Not Tread) is ‘NO!!!!!!!!!!!” (I might have omitted PAGES and PAGES and PAGES of exclamation marks — and NO, I am NOT kidding).

        The ZEROTH commandment: Thou Shalt i>NOT fuck with the User Interface. OR [FRELLING] ELSE!

        • I just recalled an old SysOps glossary entry: “Heat-Seeking Missile: A system operator who takes the first version of a new release without leaving it on the shelf for a week to let others find the first round of diastrous bugs.”

      • Oh yes. Every time there’s a Word upgrade, I shudder with horror. Because I know something useful is about to disappear.

    • Every new software release is like an anti-Christmas, where I learn what features I was depending on have been munged or removed entirely.

      • Yeah, that bit me yesterday. I’m trying a beta-test distribution in the spare laptop because the program I need doesn’t work on the production distribution. Getting the quirks out (I need the root password to dismount a USB stick? YGBSM!) is proceeding, but the calendar program I’ve used for 5 years depends on an obsolete toolkit. *That* kit got “upgraded” and some functions went away.

        At least the old calendar program’s data is in ASCII. With a fair amount of muttering, I can turn it into human-readable format, for various values of readable. (On a bad day, for various values of human…)

        OTOH, other things that were driving me crazy seem to be fixed. Not fond of the appearance of some of the shiny bits, though.

      • Previous hit moderation. Let’s try this:

        Yeah, that bit me yesterday. I’m trying a beta-test distribution in the spare laptop because the program I need doesn’t work on the production distribution. Getting the quirks out (I need the root password to dismount a USB stick? YGBSM!) is proceeding, but the calendar program I’ve used for 5 years depends on an obsolete toolkit. *That* kit got “upgraded” and some functions went away.

        At least the old calendar program’s data is in ASCII. With a fair amount of muttering, I can turn it into human-readable format, for various values of readable. (On a bad day, for various values of human…)

        OTOH, other things that were driving me crazy seem to be fixed. Not fond of the appearance of some of the shiny bits, though.

  3. “Ever get the feeling that you should go out and kill something/somebody whither or not the person/thing deserves it?” 😦

  4. Improving your user experience again, eh? I’m not surprised about non-intuitive ways to work around it.

    I feel faintly disturbed by the focus on images and links to same, as opposed to a more textual approach. Literacy has declined enough, without accelerating the trend by focusing further on “pretty picture, click here!”

  5. > Among other things that seem to have gone away is the Read More bar,

    Yay! I hate those “read more” things.

    Next up: DEATH TO ENDLESS SCROLL!

    And I noticed that a lot of blogs and web forums now don’t want to show you the date of a post; it’s either down at the bottom in a tiny faded font, or it just says “yesterday” or “three days ago”, which I find extremely annoying.

      • Flit must be a regional thing. I saw it in a Keith Laumer novel written in the ’60s, figured out what he meant by context, encountered it again somewhere twenty years later, and finally saw a picture of a pump sprayer with the brand name a full thirty years after I first encountered the name. I’ve never seen one in meatspace.

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