I’d like to pull the discussion of the possibility of Des Moines area web geekup together here. Interested in ideas for places, times, etc. and the kind of stuff people would be interested in.
The basic idea is this:
• Meeting of primarily web folks working in web development, design and management
• Sharing ideas on methods, ideas, technologies, etc.
• Venue should encourage interaction and sharing (connection if we think it’s needed, power, drinks, light, etc.)
• Open to anyone, think of it as a learning exchange
• No formal agenda but if we want to have ‘topics’ that would be great so people can pick and choose when they want to come
Anything else people want to add is wide open. I have no ownership outside of wanting to make this a reality. I realized at the last tweetup there’s a strong community of people who know their craft and just want to geek out/hack with them. Help my dream come true won’t you?
So I know lots of people are stoked about the enhancements to the Wordpress 2.5 admin interface, but after a few weeks of use I’m left wanting. There are a lot of great enhancements visually and some nice usability fixes but a couple of the biggest problems I’ve had from pre-2.5 were not addressed:
1. Quick nav for Write/Manage. They still force you to click twice just to write or manage a page. And while post writing/editing is far and away the most common pair of actions, there needs to be a way to easily flow into the page management functionality.
2. Quickly adding pages/posts from manage UI. Particularly with pages you cannot ‘add new’ without 2 additional clicks. I seriously doubt this is an overlooked issue, but quite thought out and deliberate, however, just feel cumbersome when setting up new projects and adding/editing lots of pages.
3. No customizable admin menu. Both of these issues could be conquered by a simple admin enhancement to support a user-configurable menu to promote most used actions to the top-most level. I don’t need quick access to design once the site’s deployed, neither do most users. So let me demote/remove that action from the list and add things I could really use.
Ultimately it’s an out-of-the-box vs. power user issue. With a few hours of work I could probably put together fixes for all of these…but they seem to be more core than a plugin.
