Aug 15
Frustrating User Experiences: Wordpress Media Upload
Tech with tags: user experience, wordpress
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There is a feature that changes every Wordpress release, that always has me wanting to patch. The way media is uploaded never suits my needs. It wasn’t built for me. Back in the day, the upload used to happen on a separate admin page, and then it became inline to the post page itself.
The latest version drives me the most nuts. The problems that I have are frustrating as they take a two click scenario and make it a 10 click one!
My issues:
- When you click on the media upload it flashes between the browser upload and the Flash one
- The link URL is to the image itself, when I never want this. I want to link to either none, or to a Web page (the use case shown is for posting a small thumbnail that links to the full size picture)
- The size defaults to medium, but I always want full size!
- Insert into post doesn’t do what Blogger does (put it at the top), but rather nukes anything that you have written in your post and replaces it with the image. I have to remember to select-all and copy, then insert, and then copy back in. How often do you want to nuke content in there??
- Weird classnames applied. I just want a
border="0"and a href to the page of my choice.
If I could change the defaults I would be a lot happier. Having to hack the code (which gets more spaghetti each release in this area) is a pain, and a plugin can’t hook in there.
August 16th, 2008 at 12:07 pm
It doesn’t nuke on insert for me, either in Opera or Firefox. Does it still nuke if you unselect after copying? Could it be a Safari-only or Mac-only issue?
August 16th, 2008 at 9:39 pm
Interesting. It has always done this for me on FF/Safari/Opera… all on Mac.
August 19th, 2008 at 7:37 pm
I don’t have the nuke-all problem easier, but this thing does still bug me…
Several of the things that you’ve mentioned + there’s some weird interim stage in their upload status process where it’s kind of displaying this rectangle with the name of the image in it (or something like that, can’t recall it perfectly at the moment). Anyway, if I’m ever on an iffy connection I never know – does that mean I’m screwed? or does that mean keep waiting?
August 19th, 2008 at 7:43 pm
easier=either
September 2nd, 2008 at 1:34 pm
I just now signed up with Hostmysite web server and they downloaded WP 2.6.1 for me as part of their start up package.
At least you get an image.
So, far I can’t get WP to download any images. I’ve used both browsers, I’ve used both file selections.
I can get URL to post a picture, but even EBAY doesn’t do things that way anymore.
So, far WP 2.6.1 is a complete disaster. Or it’s Hostmysite web host.
I can’t even do one plugin.
February 16th, 2009 at 2:37 pm
I hate wordpress ! ! !