It has been a very long while since I updated the blog (almost a month), and have been against my overall goal of doing so at least once a week. Oh well :P. In the past month things have been pretty flat, really. School is boring, cross country is cross country, you know, the same old stuff. But today I am going to be announcing (well, unofficially at least) that the blog will be going under considerable changes in both form and function.
You see, this blog has served its purpose amazingly. And, for being around for almost a year and a half now, is beginning to show signs of its age. While the theme has been changed several times over the course of its lifetime (the first change gave it a default WordPress theme with a dark gray banner and a black background), the core of the blog has still been run and managed by my own hosted version of WordPress. With that I have had no major issues. I have been able to, over the course of several new installations, upload backups and exports of my old installation’s posts and comments. I have been able to use plugins to manage various aspects with ease, and have been overly impressed at how the system has been done since the beginning. Unfortunately, this isn’t going to be the same soon.
I closely watched, as well as tested, the nightly builds and betas of WordPress 2.5, which introduced the new Admin interface that is in use today (which, I absolutely adore). But, just ten months later, the gang of WordPress developers are getting ready to release the Beta, and then final version of WordPress 2.7, which, in my humble opinion, is a step backwards in terms of user interface design.
New WordPress Admin Panel User Interface
The design removes the navigation tabs at the top of the administration system and places them in a sort of sidebar on the left side of the theme. In the picture above, I have minimized the sidebar to show just the icons. I am sorry, but personally I HATE sidebars. I cannot deal with them. While this may be an opinion that only resonates inside me, I can’t stand, at least in the short term, a blogging panel with a sidebar. As such, I have been on the hunt to find the next blogging platform that I will be migrating to.
And I have found it. More updates to come.