For those who have been waiting, WordPress 2.0.1 has just been released. This version has seen a month of bug fixing (over 100 bugs squashed), the majority being issues with the administration screens and their behaviour. There were some pretty detailed discussions on the developer and testing mailing lists to resolve some of these issues.
Alas, the WYSIWYG post editor is still not accessible to keyboard only users, so if you can only use a keyboard and not a mouse make sure to turn it off.
If you want to mark up your posts semantically you might want to turn it off too. With this new “Visually rich editor”, if you want to quote somebody, you need to think “indent”, and if you want to stop quoting them, think “outdent”.
The all singing new media uploader, which is right on the edit page where it should be, at least seems to work better now… but only if you can use a mouse. If you are unable to use a mouse, you will be unable to upload images and other media to your blog. Even with the fancy editor turned off. You are unable to perform this task. I know it wasn’t very friendly in the last version, but it did work, you were able to upload images, and copy and paste their tags into your post. You can no longer do that — it does not work.
I’m sorry to harp on about this but removing basic functionality, even if it were for a small number of people (which it is not — a large number of people have trouble using a mouse with precision, if at all), is still a step backwards in my book.
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I’m a little confused, everything in the WYSIWYG has keyboard shortcuts just like quicktags did, and you can exit windows with ESC, etc. Is that different from what you mean by keyboard access?
Matt, I mean that if you are on your Dashboard page (say you’ve just arrived having logged in. Press tab to give focus to the ‘view site’ link, tab again takes you to ‘sign out’, and so on until you get to ‘write’. Press ‘enter’ to activate the link. You end up on the ‘Write Post’ page, so far so good.
Next tab once to activate the ‘Title’ field (this used to be active by default), Type in your title, then tab again to activate the post field. Now type in your post content.
You are right in that you can use alt+b for bold, type some words, alt+b again to turn it off, and continue. Those access keys are documented in the little popup help (ALT+h brings it up for you). But when you want to publish your post, whereas tab used to activate the ‘publish’ button (or ‘save and continue’ in advanced mode), tab now inserts some whitespace in your post, and no amount of tabbing will get you to that button to publish!
Now, some frustrated keyboard work has just led me to discover that SHIFT-tab will back out to the title field. This is an improvement on 2.0, where that didn’t work at all.
Now, I did think that at least 20 or 30 shift-tabs would be needed to get you backwards round to the publish button — awkward but do-able. But NO! 19 shift+tabs takes you to the upload frame, the next shift-tab takes you back to who-knows-where (I can’t figure what has focus) and one more puts you back in the post field!
Not only that, but now shift-tab refuses to take you out again! Aaargh!
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Alt + pis publish.The WYSIWYG is also as easy to disable as a checkbox.
(And the alt+p shortcut will still work.)
Excellent! Thanks for that. That could do with being documented in the help.
I mentioned disabling the WYSIWYG in my post. But that still doesn’t solve the upload problem 🙁
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Now that Mike is responding here, I’d like to point to some “modifications” that I’d appreciate .. The HTML Source windows should open in a full fledged window .. I dont see any reason why it opens in a pop up window. The users should get the option where they can choose if they want to write directly in the HTML source .. That would be a welcome addition …
And then there are post fields that I feel needs to be tweaked .. When you install Ultimate Tag Warrior and try to get “Tags Suggesions” for the current post, the box is so small that the data barely fits in .. Same is the case with “Current Tags” box .. If only you could move it to the bottom of page where there are more fields such as Custom Fields and all …
I know this shouldve been in the bug tracking, but I couldnt stop myself from posting this .. 😛 ..
Take care .. !
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Hi Shahab,
You definitely need to raise these issues either directly as bugs on trac, or on the testers or hackers mailing lists.
Mike
Roger that .. 🙂
Hi, this is René again. I already did write a comment about a month ago when you posted about the former version’s inaccessibilities (sorry for not getting back to you earlier).
I will give the 2.0.1 Version a try as soon as I have time. Sad to hear that the upload feature became somewhat more inaccessible. I was wondering if there is a plugin or are some plugins that could be some kind of temporary and accessible replacement?
Also, I am thinking about the Access-Key (Shortcuts) feature in general. I noticed that some WordPress Shortcuts are in conflict with some Browser-Specific ones; it might be interesting or helpful to make access-keys user defineable(changeable, so that, if they are in the need for it, users could add, remove or change which shortcut would lead to which function in wordpress… But well – I guess this belongs to the ‘feature request’ area 🙂
Excellent! Just upgraded and working properly 🙂
Btw, I don’t get what you say about WYISWYG.
It’s not just the mouseless who can’t use the new media uploader.
On my Pocket PC using the NetFront browser I can upload a file (with extreme difficulty until I hack the CSS), but I can’t access the dinky little menu that pops up over the thumbnail.
If the upload window could display the path to the image like it used to I could code by hand like I always did – now my only option is to to type the path and filename correctly from memory!
I’m waiting to listen more about how the new version of WP can work with couple of plugins that I’ve installed on old version.
Every update of WP make me a lot of head pains with fixing of 3rd party plugins. Be carryfull if you have a lot of plugins such on my blog
Anyone can help me to customize the docking boxes title on the ‘write post’ admin section??
Julio,
you need to ask that question on the support forums.
I really don’t know, but I guess there is some bug in the news buttons of my wordpress 2.0.5 which gives me a link to this ‘novelty’ 🙂
Seems like wordpress planet has a small bug 😛