Ready To Ride The Crazy Horse
For those of you who are subscribed to the SVN mailing list may have seen something new called Crazyhorse. This branch of WordPress nicknamed “Crazyhorse” will be used by the Automattic team to develop and test User Interface designs. This branch is seperate from WordPress itself so as to create a sandbox for experimentation. The UI changes which are found within this branch will then be tested via a UI testing facility where they use special lasers to figure out how a particular person uses the software.
For those of you who would like to keep tabs on the crazyhorse branch, you can download it from the crazyhorse repository located here: http://svn.automattic.com/wordpress/branches/crazyhorse/
Matt hopes that within a few weeks, this special branch of WordPress will look similar to the design concepts found within this PDF which showcases each section of the WordPress administration panel with detailed analysis as to how each part will function. http://ma.tt/dropbox/2008/06/wordpress-prototype-1.1.pdf
I’ve browsed around the PDF file myself and found it to be rather interesting.
This is the first time I’ve seen a detailed PDF document outlining various aspects of the WordPress backend user interface. To give you a teaser of what is within the PDF file, check out this alternative WRITE POST panel which by the looks of things, would me much better for me to use than the current implementation.
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Comment by Ptah Dunbar on 17 June 2008
Wow, this looks pretty interesting. Didn’t think the svn mailing list had this coming, I unsubscribed a while ago. Thanks for the heads up Jeff.
Comment by PJ on 17 June 2008
The “write post” panel gets worse and worse, IMO. HTML editor should be default, categories at the top, drop tags altogether. And FYI, your preview comment plugin should be the last thing on the page so the entire website is not redrawing after each key I type, for those of us with slower computers. Check my site to see how much faster my comment preview is, still slow, but actually usable.
PJs last blog post..Skinning Players
Comment by Ryan Imel on 17 June 2008
Hey, this is great. Thanks for posting this. I know I’ll be digging into this tonight
Comment by Jeffro on 17 June 2008
@Ptah Dunbar - Yeah, I can’t understand most of the stuff that goes on there, but every now and then a nugget like this shows up.
Comment by Jeffro on 17 June 2008
@PJ - That may be so, but at least this directive enforces the idea that the core team does focus on the user interface and they are experimenting with different layouts to find out which ones would work best the majority of time. As you can see from the screenshot I posted, that looks reminiscent of the old Write Panel which appears to be one of the experimental layouts for the Write Panel.
As for the Live Comment Preview. I’ve disabled it since user’s have the ability to edit their comments. Let me know if that is any better.
Comment by Ian Stewart on 17 June 2008
I’m not to keen on the menu structure looking so much like Tiger/Fluency (I prefer the default admin + Ozh’s drop down menu plugin) but everything else looks really, really interesting.
Comment by Joshua Goodwin on 27 June 2008
@PJ: With regards the WYSIWYG editor, remember that a lot of people who use WordPress do not know anything about HTML.
Comment by Jeffro on 27 June 2008
@Joshua Goodwin - Also worth mentioning is that WordPress 2.5 remembers which editor you used. If you click on HTML and save the post, the next time you visit the Write Panel, the HTML editor will be selected.
Comment by Kirk M on 29 June 2008
I’ve been running Crazyhorse in a local WordPress install for a week now and personally, I like the changes so far. The images in the PDF doc particularly appeal to me simply because there’s no color involved, just good ol’ black, white and shades of gray but that’s strictly a personal taste kind of thing. Currently, the overall layout is a but “thick” and clunky looking if you know what I mean (rather huge left hand menu sidebar etc) but I would have to guess getting the functionality working first is the highest priority and aesthetics come later.
As much as I would like using this new type of interface however, I’m sure there are plenty of others who wouldn’t unless the sidebar menus could be hidden especially and perhaps even only in the case of TinyMCE. I would think that the best option would be to offer 2 different versions of a finished WordPress release once Crazyhorse is considered “complete” rather than offering just one release with parts of the original Admin interface and parts of Crazyhorse or just one or the other. That way WP bloggers could have their choice of the original “classic” interface or the new Crazyhorse interface. Of course I have no idea how hard this would be to implement in practice.
Okay…so much for personal opinion here.
Kirk Ms last blog post..WordPress 2.6 Adds All the Extra Goodies
Comment by Jeffro on 29 June 2008
@Kirk M - That would be pretty cool. To have an option between classic interface and the new interface but that may lead to an increased size of the core and I’ve already seen that the folks involved with WordPress do their best to keep the core file size down to a minimum.
Comment by Kirk M on 29 June 2008
@Jeffro - Actually I was thinking more along the lines of offering two different versions of WordPress altogether when “Crazyhorse” is considered ready for prime time.
When someone heads to WordPress.org to download the “latest and greatest” they’ll have a choice between a “Classic” (but improved like any new major release is) WP download or a “Crazyhorse” flavored download. Both would be riding on the same version of WordPress of course. That way the dev’s can keep the core clean and tidy for each since both are essentially the same core. What this would basically give the blogger is a choice between Admin UI’s and since both downloads are essentially the same version of WordPress and the same DB version, a blogger could simply change over to the “Classic” version if they didn’t like “Crazyhorse” so well by updating to the other version or perhaps just the “diff” files.
You might know better than I would but this doesn’t seem like it would be so hard to do especially in the light that there are currently 2 different builds already if you count the 2.6 “Trunk” and the Crazyhorse “Branch”.
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