Austin Web Designer - Adam Freetly

I wouldn't say up-graded, but WordPress 2.5 is definitely different. I feel the need to punish myself thusly, since wordpress is now my day job, besides my 'hobby' of supporting the themes I've developed. I've been playing with the SVN upgrades for a month or so now, making sure my themes work. While I was working on Disconnected, my frustration came to a head:

In that screenshot, there is:

1. A list of things you can do right now
2. A list of statistics about your blog's history
3. A Message alerting you to upgrade your theme.

Guess which one's the alert (*hint: it's not the red one*) ? I was wrong: nearly all of Joen's comments about the wordpress admin are still valid. Among the other things that I am incredulous that a professional design firm chose: The mystery meat navigation above the post area:

Let's be honest: Even if I could tell what the hell those first two images were supposed to represent, years of using Word, WordPerfect, and OpenOffice have taught me to click on the tree when I want to insert a picture. Why is the same tree there, if it doesn't mean the same thing?

It's disheartening that the design of the dashboard goes on completely behind closed doors, when everyone keeps talking about how big the community has become. Yes, allowing people to comment directly on the photoshop mocks before coding them out might have yielded a lot of stupid comments, and possibly taken forever.

But listening to the valid comments might have prevented this. After all that money and effort, Fluency is here, taking over for AFD admin as my monochromatic dashboard of choice. And it does usability better than the default.