Wordpress 2.1 Running Smoothly but a Few Bugs In Admin
Jan 24th, 2007 by Kirk M
I’m really quite please how smooth the upgrade to Wordpress 2.1 went. Once I had read the upgrade instructions a dozen times and accomplished all the upgrades from 2.0.5 on of course. Ok, so I’m a slow study but practice makes perfect and I never really had any trouble with the previous upgrades either come to think of it. Just a lot of sweating. It may seem foolish, but this little piece of blogdom, as small and unknown as it is, has become quite important to me. Not so much to the fact that I’m out in public or at least the public that bothers to stop by from time to time but more to the fact that I just love to write. That and the therapeutic advantage of forcing me to wake back up to my surroundings at large after spending so many years alone and focusing on a dire duty and nothing else (not complaining here, just facing facts. Those years were damn dark ones). So this small little blog is pretty important to me. Whether it’s popular or not is irrelevant.
Now to the couple of minor bugs I’ve seen so far:
The fonts used for the news item titles located in those little gray blocks at the bottom of the Dashboard are just too bloody big and so too are the ones used for any title on any page such as the Manage/Files page. If the title is greater than just a few short words long it either mashes all together or or disappears into the dialog box (such as the little gray boxes). This was a problem pointed out by a few testers in the Wordpress ‘Beta’ forum that was present in the early builds also. I have to wonder why they didn’t correct this in the final. It’s very bothersome at times. The problem occurs in both Firefox 2.0 and IE 7.0
Another anomaly occurs only in IE 7.0 when writing or editing a post or a page and expanding or collapsing (clicking the plus or minus sign) any of the options in the right hand sidebar such as ‘Categories’ or ‘Post Password’ for example triggers the “Are you sure you want to navigate away from this page?” dialog box
Note: You have to write or edit something before this will occur. Just loading the editor or a post or page to edit and not writing anything–the problem will not occur. Only after you begin writing or change some text in an edit.
This also happens when expanding or collapsing the the options below the upload manager (’Optional Excerpt’ etc) but there is another problem when expanding or collapsing these three options as well. Unless the option below the one expanded is expanded as well, the one above expands down into and behind the one below. If you expand the one below, the option field shows up the way it should. If this happens to be the ‘Optional Excerpt’ field and the ‘Trackback’ fields the ‘Trackback’ field will expand into the ‘Customs Fields’ below it until that is expanded as well.
And still another problem with those three in that when all three are collapsed again it sucks up the ‘Delete this Post’ button to somewhere under one of those three expandable options above it and won’t reappear until you expand all three again. Also, once collapsed, there is a big blank space left where the ‘Optional Excerpt’ field used to be when expanded. Again–these anomalies are only seen in IE 7.0, not Firefox 2.0. (I haven’t been able to test for these bugs in IE 6.0 but if I get the chance I’ll add an update to this post).
Considering that the majority of internet users use Internet Explorer rather than Firefox (Which I use for everything except the Microsoft Update site and the few times when I need Active X), these bugs really need to be taken care of simply due to the fact that Wordpress is a much loved, much used blogging paltform and all the backend improvements in the world won’t matter if the Admin interface is not rendering and behaving correctly. Considering that this upgrade is running so smoothly, the font size problem was already documented and the rest of the bugs show up only in Internet Explorer, I have to believe that these aforementioned problems are universal in nature rather than with my install.
One slightly sad and frustrating event is that I lost one of my Favorite UTW companion plugins. One that Christina Davis mentioned to me in a previous comment called ‘Ultimate Tag Warrior Re-tag Posts Extension’. It made tagging and retagging posts so much easier than what the regular ‘Write’ page offered with the UTW plugin installed and now with the upgarde to 2.1, it no longer works and I had to deactivate it. I have to believe that this is due to the new backend of version 2.1 as compared to previous versions of Wordpress 2.x. The plugin simply stopped working properly and would only show the first page of most recent posts and nothing else. Even the ‘Previous Entries’ link would not work.Oh well, perhaps it will be updated eventually and I can have the convenience back once more since I can’t find any other plugin even remotely capable of doing what ‘Re-Tag’ did.Despite the above bugs and couple of now defunct plugins, I have no regrets in the upgrade. Things in Admin work well, the new features are welcome, changing of menus seems a bit smoother and slightly faster and the extra Ajax incorporated in this release (which you can’t really tell it’s there at all unless you went back to the previous version) rounds things out nicely and as long as you’re using Firefox 2.0, the changes in the editor are a nice touch as well. Still, the problems I saw using IE 7.0 need to be looked at to see if they are actually universal in nature or an isolated problem. After all…I only use one computer.
