What happened to “never change a running system”? WP still has so many in-built problems from the beginning that will probably never get fixes, but the team keeps revamping the interface. For customers I always install a plugin with which I break down the author’s backend to the minimum they need as easily spottable as possible. Making users have to drill down contextual menus is bad UX design. They need to always see all their limited options at a glance in order not to feel puzzled and overwhelmed. To make that a core functionality would make sense to me.

This update will also result in a lot more of abandoned plugins, too (as if there aren’t enough already), but e.g. to address the questions why on earth that happens so often doesn’t even come up. If the plugins I use to change the user interface will be abandoned, because they‘d have to be built new from the ground up, I dunno how to tell the users they have to learn a new interface and processes, just because the WP team felt enthusiastic and self-absorbed enough about their work, so they broke their product for the existing user base.

The core flaws I mentioned are: a robust staging / moving process is missing, educated guesses about url structure (category and page), bad handling of umlauts in slugs, relying on the server’s php mail setup instead of using smtp, monitoring core file and directory integrity, exposing vital info for hacker bots by default and so on.

There’s still so many third party plugins to install or code to add to theme functions, just to get a decent and robust WP install. But again the main concern is about aesthetics and just as the ever changing Gutenborg interface it will frustrate and possibly lose existing users on the way.

Just 2 cents from a guy who sets up WordPress for the usual guy who doesn’t live entirely online.