As anyone who has seen my WordPress review will know, I think WordPress is pretty darned good. So I was really looking forward to upgrading WordPress 2, especially because of all the hype.
I am the sort of person who tries not to read reviews of things I really want. Like with big blockbuster movies I try to keep dumb to all the details so it is a big surprise when I finally get to see it. Things never live up to the hype. With WordPress I wish I hadn’t have listened to all the people who said it was going to be the best thing ever.
Don’t get me wrong, it is good, a great achievement and still the best. Just not worthy of all the hype. I am not entirely sure it is worth being called “2.0” as the improvements are good but not massive. Am I being grumpy just because I had my hopes up? Maybe, let’s take a look at the improvements.
- Imports – supposedly improved but could do it before
- Admin – improved interface but … meh.
- WYSIWYG – could do it before with a plugin, PFF does it too
- Image upload – some people might find it useful, I use flickr so don’t use these features much but the whole thing seems to work in a really odd way for my liking (am I just old fashioned?)
- AJAX – yeah yeah, doesn’t actually make that big a difference though right?
Apparently there are a whole bunch of improvements under the hood. That’s great but it will take a while for these upgrades to filter into plugins and things that make the blogger more productive. One of the “improvements” seems to be with URL-rewriting and has caused a lot of people problems, particularly some plugin developers.
Maybe I was expecting too much. I was hoping for some new features that would take the blog software market by storm. Something new to take us to a new level. What I got could have been acheived already with the old version and one or two plugins. Come on Matt, you can do better I am sure! At least I would have liked full-on tagging capability and the multi-user features rolled in.
Am I being harsh? Somebody tell me something to make me fall in love with WordPress all over again because right now I don’t know why I bothered upgrading …