As for changing the plugin interface, I am afraid I don’t have great news there. From all I have read the main focus of 2.8 will be on upgrading the media interface. That is your area right?

It could be an opportunity, though, to get involved and make sure they do it right.

My biggest hope on that is that they don’t lock you into a single option for media. This is a very important area for plug-ins because you can really bloat your code to give everyone the features they want and most of them I would not even use. But I want to make sure it is easy to add the features that I will use.

The plugin changes are also bothersome. Please, I hope they have a design meeting, get their basic paths/api set and not make any new changes other than additions.

The constant changes are the problem.

2.7 is the first version done with user input.

I can definitely see where it could get frustrating if you are always using the bottom half of the menu (which as a dev, that is where you are going to be), but if you think about it 80% of users are going to spend most of their time in the top half.

Also when you collapse the menu to icons you get a little pop-out sub-menu for each main menu. This gives the maximum screen real-estate, eliminates scrolling, and is still faster/easier than clicking on a top-level menu, waiting for the page to load and then clicking on a second-level menu, which was the method before 2.7.

I am starting to sound like a shill, but I just think they are finally headed in the right direction, after a pretty rough detour earlier this year.

The problem with vertical is that you many times need to actively scroll to get to things. In the classic interface you rarely had to do this, so the interface now seems to take longer to do things than before–not an upgrade. In many ways it does look like they are trying to hide things, which is goofy.

The version numbering just points out to me that they have a weird desire to go their own way just to be different. No really good reason to do it, just doing it to be difficult. It’s confusing and meaningless the way they are doing it.

While I would love to be a slacker and stop supporting my plugins, I’m too stupid to do that and will keep updating them. So there will be new versions released soon.

Those of us who have been keeping up with the dev and design process of the new release are generally happy with the changes being made.

It is strange that you mentioned wide-screens. I am using a wide-screen also and because of that would rather give up a little real-estate on the left than at the top of the screen. Especially since the left-menu can be collapsed to icons.

As for version numbers I completely agree this should be called version 3.0 but this is semantics so I am not going to fight them over it.

Yes, there are good reasons for waiting to upgrade most software and there are good reasons to stay at the bleeding edge. It depends on your needs.

Personally I am happy to move on past the mistakes of 2.5 and 2.6 but if you want to freeze your plugins at 2.6 compatibility I am sure you will have plenty of people happy to find plugin that work with the version they are still running.

I just wish it was a little easier to filter plugins based on the version of WP that they work with.

Anyway, I couldn’t help but read your post … and OMG do I ever agree with you! WP seems to be deliberately getting worse and worse. I’m very tired of trying to find what vanished to where, and having my plugins stop working for no apparent reason.

If they don’t get a clue, they’re going to be replaced by their competition …

René