Review of WordPress 2.2, the Bad Things

Let me tell you a little story.

A few years back, “Irish Spring” was my preferred brand of soap. I would shower and feel really clean. I liked the scent. I even liked the way it looked with the little green stripes. Then they decided to improve it.

Although the New and Improved bars looked and smelled the same, they were different. When I showered, I would feel slimey and unclean. My skin broke out in a bright red rash. It wasn’t my old favorite bath soap anymore. I couldn’t use it without breaking out.

Needless to say I threw it away and never bought another bar of their soap.

 The reason I bring this up is I just installed the “New and Improved” WordPress 2.2 and I am not a particularily happy camper.

First… If you use more than one space, by mistake or otherwise, you get Á  which is not a good thing. Especially when you have used double spaces for an effect of some sort. Say, indenting a picture or some type for the aestetic value. Now, you get  Á  instead of white space. (the characters were inserted by using extra spaces) This not only affects current posts, but ALL posts. With more than a year and a half of writing, I don’t want to go back to fix (or check for that matter) every individual post.

Second… Where is my Post Preview? With previous versions of WP, I could Save and Continue Editing to get an idea of what the actual post will look like with the preview. Now, if you don’t Publish, you don’t have any idea of what your readers will see (see the first point). Why on earth would WP take out such an important feature?

Third… Widgets. Sure, widgets are a great addition to WP. The only problem with them is if you put One Widget in the Sidebar, it Takes Over the Wole Sidebar! Again, after 1 1/2 years, I don’t want to have to redo my whole sidebar by creating widgets for each and every one of the additional featues, put them where they used to be and hope they fit the way I want them. Widgets are great for setting up a sidebar from scratch, but not when there is already an established format in use. Why can’t they make it interchangable with what already exists in an existing template?

This is not to mention that I wanted to put a Widget in my Footer. Luckily, I had written the updated footer with a sidebar template, so there were not a lot of Major adjustments needed. I just had to create text widgets to include the information I already had. But, you have to remember… Widgets at present, only work within a sidebar. You can’t just put them where you want them, only in the sidebar or something you make “look” like a sidebar.

Lastly, I’m not sure if it is caused by the Widgets or the Version 2.2 of WordPress or something else, but the Page Rank Checker has stopped showing my PR since installation of 2.2. How will that affect my real page rank?

I haven’t even checked the interaction with all the Plugins I use yet, I just can’t wait.

Has anyone else run into similar problems? Any fixes, expecially for the Post Preview?

[tags]WordPress 2.2,Widgets,Missing Post Preview[/tags]