Disruptive Conversations

Last week people in one of the various web forums I'm in started complaining about the new "WordPress" user interface for posting and how they couldn't easily add images or access their Media Library. I and others were completely confused because nothing had changed in our WordPress installations.

It turned out to be that the people were using the WordPress.COM hosted service while we with no problem were using self-hosted WordPress on our own servers. (What Automattic folks call "WordPress.ORG" software.)

I still have a WordPress.Com account and so I logged in and hit the "New Post" button and... sure enough... there was a brand new user interface. Well... first there was a "Beep Beep Boop" :-) :

And THEN the editing window appeared:

And yes, indeed, there was no way to add an image! You could create a "gallery", but there was no way to add a single image. Nor could you get to your Media Library to add an existing image! There was also nothing on the WordPress.com main blog or in the support forums - although there were many threads asking about this.

You could still add media to a post by going into your Dashboard and then doing "Posts -> Add New" to get to the traditional editing window, but this "new" window was the default if you just clicked the link at the top of the admin window.

I found this quite bizarre and even talked about this in my report into last week's FIR podcast episode.

I went as far as opening a new topic in the WordPress.com support forums where it was confirmed on July 5th that there was no way to add media.

But two days later on July 7th a post to that topic alerted me to the fact that the "Add Media" button was back... and indeed it is:

So all seems well and people can get back to adding media from the window.

I still haven't seen any explanation other than that the team is "working on some updates and changes". I would hope that in the future if they are going to remove something big like this they'd give people a bit more of a clue... but... by the same token I commend the WordPress.com team on all they regular work they keep doing to that site. While I use self-hosted WordPress software, I do recognize that many of the changes and improvements to that software first get tested out on the WordPress.COM hosted service.

Anyway, if you were frustrated about this last week... it's back! All is good now. :-)

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