What is the thorn in your side when you work with WordPress? What bugs you and what would make your development life a lot easier?
I recently released the Sidekick WordPress Plugin! Essentially it targets a basic pain I’ve been having with WordPress on the “Pages” section.
I often have to deal with numerous pages (100+), many of which are nested/hierarchical pages. It currently is cumbersome to administer clients sites which are typically more than just a blog. So I created the Sidekick Plugin to be my “sidekick” when working on these websites. The idea is simple, Sidekick helps me do things that are not currently in the WordPress core, making my life a whole heck of a lot easier.
So I Want To Ask You…
What is the thorn in your side when you work with WordPress? What bugs you and what would make your development life a lot easier? What are the little things that annoy you?
Small or Big!
One common redundancy or time eater when working with clients is the ability to edit and manage Media efficiently. Currently if you upload a bunch of images to a post or to the media library, it is difficult to easy update information quickly and easily, for example, the name.
Currently, through the Media page you would have to open each file, which in turn loads a new page. Some clients have horrible hosting and this can be painfully slow and time consuming, especially when just setting up a site with a bunch of photos (photographer site).
It would be nice to have a Quick Edit feature much like Posts/Pages do. Each attachement does not have a bunch of information, so it would fit nicely into this format. This would make it easy to update names, add alt text, captions, descriptions easily… and view that info easily too without having to load an entirely new page
Great plugin idea and execution!
I’m with Luke on this one.
Media management in wordpress flat out sucks. There is no way to easily bulk edit media, no attach/detach/reattach, no true sorting options, and the overall management screen is downright inefficient and horrible.
Another huge annoyance is that I don’t have the ability to display all my media from around the web in the media manager. Why O why, can’t I simply add in my yourtube information into the media manager, and simply browse my youtube vids for inserting into an article. Same goes for google albums, and a host of other services.
For me personally, it really sucks because I happen to store all of my videos on my own rtmp server cluster. There is no easy way for a user to upload a video via the manager, that actually saves it to the rtmp cluster instead of the wp server. Same goes for pulling in the vids into articles.
Frankly, I can go on and on about how much I hate the media manager, but I believe that most feel the same way and have the same annoyances as I do.
Shawn’s response made me think of another possible improvement for the media manager, but may not be in the scope of the plugin. It would be nice to organize media. I have a snippet I can add that inserts a link to filter by, for example, PDF’s. This type of thing is always nice.
To take it a step further, you could continue to mimic WordPress posts, after all the attachments are essentially posts (attachments.php). I wonder if it would be useful to allow add “categories” for media elements. This would allow you to essentially create little libraries of images or other media content and allow you to query them to place on a page, slideshow, or something along those lines… Food for thought.
By the way, the attach/reattach thing is greatly frustrating too
. Any small improvements to the media manager will always be extremely useful in almost every website scenario/user.
If I had to pick some painful areas, I think WP is weak in terms of media management as the above posters have already said. I would still love to see the continued evolution of WPAlchemy, specifically making the design of metaboxes even easier. Apart from that, I’m big on shifting backend operations to the frontend, which is why I like plugins such as the front-end-editor and themes like p2.
I recently actually stumbled on a solution just a few days ago to a big pain that comes with designing on WordPress. It’s a firebug extension called firefile that lets you instantly save css changed made through firebug directly on a webserver. It cuts out very tedious steps (switching between browser and editor, saving the file/uploading and refreshing the page to see the changes live). I’ve been having much more fun designing and tweaking inside the browser.
I know you will add support to custom post type on the Sidekick plugin. So it will be great if the plugin add some column to display the taxonomy filter. It can avoid some extra code.
And I agree with the other comment about media.
Nothing else except how WordPress keep in memory saved widget. But I think that’s more a core problem.
Ditto. Media Management is too cumbersome.
Checkout how Big Cartel does there image uploader (screenshots: http://cl.ly/8XYM).
@Peter Knight Thanks for the information about FireFile. I love it. I have been wanting something like this for awhile. My wish for WP is to have modular blocks of content. I am ‘blessed’ to use DotNetNuke at my work and it is a hot mess of non-standards, bloated javascript heap. It doesn’t help that is based on ASP.NET WebForms not MVC. But the one thing I like about it is modular blocks of content.
@Derek, thanks for your comments, I’ve also needed content blocks for my development (e.g. press release contact info at the end of the page).
I use a custom form handling plugin I created which uses the concept of custom post types and shortcodes to embed forms in pages. The idea is basically that you create a post (form) and then you can embed it into any other page by name/id. I think this can be the basis of a good content block plugin.
Great idea Derek!
I would definitely love to develop a kick ass media manager for WordPress, all the ideas above are awesome, thank you all so far for the comments!
take a peek at the plugin “Attachments” by J Christopher. http://mondaybynoon.com/wordpress-attachments/
It’s a really good start to simplifying the image attachment process.
@Dimas This http://demo.crowdfavorite.com/carrington-business/ is what I would like to replicate using your WPAlchemy class. Click on the theme admin and look at editing a page. Also I am trying to add the Media button to the TinyMCE bar that shows in the fullscreen mode of the TinyMCE editor. Do you know how I might be able to do that? Also I read in your about that you live in Fresno, I live in Visalia.
#mediamanagement: Relevant perhaps, there’s a Google summer code project coder working on a new uploader, I think it’s based on plupload.
@Derek, glad you found FireFile useful as well, I wish I had it years ago.
@Dimas, I’m using WPAlchemy for forms (lifesaver) & have created a plugin that can inject (custom posts) anywhere in a theme, is your custom plugin going to be public?
@all, How did we get to be such nerds?
@Lane Just spent the last 2 minutes bouncing your homepage around…nice
Thanks, but credit goes to Mr. Doob
http://wordpress.tv/2011/08/14/matt-mullenweg-state-of-the-word-2011/
Somewhere in the middle, Matt M. addresses the media handeling. Says they are looking to the drag-and-drop uploader for google+ as inspiration.
I would love to see the Sidekick features integrated into WordPress – that is truly features we all want.
Currently in WordPress, I hate that there’s no GUI checkbox to totally remove comments. It’s so annoying to remove that stuff with code, when I’m using WP as a CMS site.
I have to agree with the others, the Media manager needs a major overhaul , there is a cool drag and drop plugin in the repo called WP Drag and Drop Upload, I guess Plupload does the same and it will be in next release, but they do not address the real problems in my opinion.
It flat out sucks that there is no way to control media folders and management permissions plus there is no simple elegant way to hook into it. The js to hook into the uploader is one of the worst things I have seen in WordPress, not to mention the actual media which is always tied into a post id.
For example creating specific media or media folders for certain roles/users, post types, option pages, plugins, etc. It’s one of the reason I simply cannot consider WordPress an actual cms, and I don’t see much on the horizon to make these sweeping changes.
My pain is having to do things like creating meta boxes from scratch, recently it got a hell of a lot easier thanks to your “wpalchemy” plugin.
I which WordPress would have an interface for setting things like this.
@Jermaine Check out Advanced Custom Fields then, a great plugin with ui for creating a wide variety of custom fields and metaboxes.
Oh man, where do I start? I began my professional development with WordPress and have used it for several years… What stands out:
a. Media manager. Yep, already been stated. I honestly don’t mind it that much, but dear god is it disorganized.
b. Metaboxes — But now I’ve found WP_Alchemy, everything’s like 100% better.
c. Custom Post Types/Custom Taxonomy — THIS MAKES ME WANT TO BURN WORDPRESS WITH FIRE. Seriously, I could spit this shit is so dumb:
“Oh, you just built a custom post type called BlaBla? You want me to display that via the archive.php template? Oh, nope; not going to do that, even though you’re accessing it from the slug you gave when defining it. Oh, nope; simply creating a new template file called archive-BlaBla.php doesn’t work either — I have **no idea** you’re wanting the BlaBla post type, even though you’re accessing it at the slug you gave and are viewing it via a template that has the bloody post type’s name IN THE BLINKING FILENAME… Don’tchaknow you need to write a modified query to make anything even slightly functional? Duuuuuuuuh… Stupid coder.”
Meanwhile, in Drupal:
“Click… Click… Type… Click… Click… Okay! Everything works perfectly now! What do you mean, ‘do you want a custom template for that’? Sure, I guess I could use one…? But if not, that’s okay too! Here, have a beer!”
d. The complete inability to version control stuff in the database. Again, my experience in Drupal has made me see why this kind of thing is useful. Say you spend an hour configuring a really complex View (I.e., “An arbitrary way of listing content in the site.”) via the Views UI. If you want to version control it, you can use either Views Bulk Exporter or Features (Or probably a half-dozen other methods) to save it as its own module, which can then be checked-in to your preferred version control system. This is CRAZY USEFUL when you’re doing the whole dev->staging->production development methodology.
e. Relevant to that — siteurl and home. Most modern PHP-based CMSes, you drop into a web-accessible directory, make sure the MySQL databases is set up properly in the config file, and you’re good to go. I have had the most hellacious time recently trying to manage all of WordPress’ stupid, stupid hard-coded URLs between several instances of the same codebase (Again, dev->staging->production workflow, with multiple dev machines). There is absolutely no reason why any URL should be hardcoded into the system (And don’t get me started with how much WordPress serializes data — makes writing any sort of conversion script rather difficult.).
I’m sure I can think of others…
What really get my goat about wordpress is the fact that most of us view it and use it simply as a blogging tool, yet the developers seem to assume that we’re geeks like them.
I don’t expect to have to delve into such things as “child themes” and so forth in order to simply update WP without losing any modifications I’ve made. I don’t want it made more complex–if anything, it needs to be simplified.
If not for the control over comments and spam I’d gladly change to a different platform.It’s a tool, not a career.