Please Reinstate the Option of Choice to Use the Old Publishing Format
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@jeremeylduvall I am just about to have a coronary. NO REVISIONS?
Are you people out of your ever-living minds? Clearly, you are programmers and not writers.I use the revisions consistently — not only in my writing, but in my sharing with readers. In my last post, a poem, I had 44 revisions. A reader asked a specific question about technique, and I was able to go back and find an early revision to post in the comment section, for purposes of discussion. This often happens.
Just because you don’t find the revision file important, doesn’t mean that writers don’t. It’s been one of the functions of WordPress that I use consistently and find most important. I often will have well over 100 revisions. On long-form posts, or topics that continue over several posts, I can have as many as 200 revisions. Particularly where questions of fact arise, or details of research are questioned, it’s possible to go back and settle the issue.
Honest to goodness. You promote your site as one for writers, You tell us to use the longform tags. You emphasize the WordPress commitment to quality, and then you take away tools that serious, quality writers find important.
That kind of decision making isn’t just strange, it’s irrational.
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@jeremeylduvall That “you” that I referenced as being programmers and not writers wasn’t directed specifically at you, but at a certain mindset that seems to have taken over here. :)
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Clearly, you are programmers and not writers.
Programmers/developers do use tools to track changes to their code, and I guess it’s a point @jeremeylduvall (or other WP staff) could take back to the developers, how would you (the developers) feel if you no longer had those tools to look back into your previous code? I don’t think you’d code with as much peace of mind, and that’s exactly how we, bloggers/writers, feel.
I’m glad to see other people support that Revisions remain. It really has always been a neat feature WordPress offered (which I don’t think many other blogging platform do), even though it must require lots of resources on the backend.
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I referred above to 25 being the limit to the number of revisions saved, but that does not apply to post revisions. The Page Revisions support page confirms that the number saved will be 25 on pages:
WordPress.com will store the last 25 revisions for each page on your blog. Revisions allow you to look back at the recent changes you’ve made and revert to an earlier version if necessary.
I’m glad to note that WordPress once knew at least one of the purposes for post or page revisions. Above, shoreacres mentions up to 200 revisions. The number doesn’t surprise me, as I’ve certainly exceeded that on some of my pages which have been revised dozens of times, but that WordPress retains that many did surprise me a bit, probably because I do most of my editing in pages as opposed to posts. In fact most of my site is in pages, and the limit of revisions still appears to be 25 on each of my pages. However, I presently have 47 revisions on the first post I checked.
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The Post Revisions support page also indicated that the limit of revisions is 25:
WordPress.com will store the last 25 revisions for each post on your blog.
Has the limit been changed or discarded recently?
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@shoreacres, oh, I totally quoted you to emphasize that analogy! I didn’t mean to call you on it :)
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Perhaps it has. The layout of the revisions pages was changed some time ago — I remember it happening, but not exactly when. I know I’ve been able to go back in time beyond 25 revisions, but perhaps I’ve not tried that since the change.
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That’s definitely an interesting point. When I click the “Add New Post” function from the New Editor, other than clicking “My Sites” (leading to a page refresh), there isn’t an easy way for me to get back to the menu shown here that would allow me to interact with the rest of my site
It’s more than that. WHILE I’m composing posts I often open my media library, the feedback section, comments, or another post or page in a new tab to check, copy or update something. In the classic editor those options are right there on the screen and it takes me a single click to access them, and the new screen that opens still has the exact same sidebar and basic layout as the main screen I’m working on, so I go on without missing a beat.
In the new editor, there’s no way to reach the rest of the dashboard. What’s more, the My Sites sidebar won’t help, as of the features mentioned above ONLY posts and pages appear, and those are useless to me as 1) there’s no way to switch off the excerpt view so you can actually see more than two posts at a time, 2) there’s no way to filter posts by date or category, and 3) there’s no quick edit or bulk edit capability.
As has been said many times in this thread and elsewhere: You cannot give us something that’s missing more than half the functions we use on a regular basis and then try to tell us it’s better.
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@ jeremeyduvall- thanks for your effort on this thread.
I haven’t had time to review the whole thread since my last post here, but I hope you will consider my responses here to your recent post:@ jeremeyduvall,
Revisions will not be included in the New Editor. Could you let us know how often you find yourself using revisions and the circumstance that causes you to revert to a revision? Personally, I rarely find myself using post revisions.
I’ve used revisions thousands of times.
I would like to second musicdoc’s response to you above. I’ve used revisions regularly since I started my blog over four years ago.
Often because my most recent edit suddenly wrecks something (this can be because I make a stupid mistake, or because a wp bug suddenly rears its head (like the one that strips anchor points and jumps within a post if/when you switch between the visual and the text editor while editing).
There have been other reasons as well–it’s hard offhand to remember them all. But I certainly don’t do it for no reason!
I would like to make a second point and that is that many users like myself have not come near the beep boop editor since we first tried it and found it very wanting, or ever since we found out that it only saves to one’s browser and so causes massive losses of what was assumed to be safely backed up data. Because of this, I had no idea that the new improved posting experience included no access to previous revisions, which is why I haven’t complained about it til now when I by chance happened to read Musicdoc’s reply to you!
So lack of complaints doesn’t in this case mean that users are happy with missing functionality in the new editor. As soon as ONE important functionality is missed, the user won’t come back to even discover the others…
If it is the case that the developers feel nobody misses revisions it’s probably because huge numbers of users of the classic editor haven’t been forced to miss them yet.
re your reply on the following:
Also, no response to my comment about the number of bloggers unaware of the elimination of the link back to the classic editor because they haven’t deleted their cookies yet.
We’ve been tracking the statistic over the full course of the six months since implementation, and it has continued to steadily drop. This wasn’t a judgement based on a handful of weeks of data.
I use that toggle every time my cookie happens to expire and I suddenly find ourselves on the new editor. This is of course a rare occurrence! When happens again at some point, I will be very annoyed not to find a quick and easy way to back out of the wrong editor… I don’t see why the posting experience of those who prefer the classic editor should disregarded by removing that button.
Thanks in advance for noting these comments…
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@jeremeyduvall
Please could you tell us why the option to revert to the Classic Editor cannot be restored. It is clear from reading this thread, that there are many outstanding issue with the new editor that are not going to be resolved in just a few days. In the meantime people are really struggling.Come on Jeremey – you’re a Happiness Engineer, committed to making your users’ blogging experience more pleasurable. What possible harm can re-introducing the option do – apart from perhaps embarrassing the person who made the decision to remove it? You would certainly make many WP bloggers happy.
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@ jeremeyduvall,
That’s definitely an interesting point. When I click the “Add New Post” function from the New Editor, other than clicking “My Sites” (leading to a page refresh), there isn’t an easy way for me to get back to the menu shown here that would allow me to interact with the rest of my site:
Perhaps we could adjust the navigation a bit so that you could potentially save or publish a post and then get back to that menu without a page refresh being needed. I’ll keep you posted!
You don’t have to go to “Add a New Post” to observe this. The same is true of the new editor for any previously created post. That the dashboard menu is an essential collection of links and tools to connect to the rest of the site, and absent from the new editor, is the same argument that I made and you dismissed immediately before acknowledging that it is a problem.
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Click to view “LEFT SIDE admin” I see in the classic editor (as well as on every other page I use): http://tinyurl.com/ojezyjn
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I have also looked at other pages on the new admin site, and found it equally un-user-friendly. There are no screen options anywhere, and “Blog Posts” each post in the list takes up 2-3 inches, compared to the “older” posts page, which has an easy-to-scan list of at least 6-8 posts viewable on the screen.
Bottom line, as of this moment, I will not be using any of the ” improved posting experience” advertised at the top of every new post page (and how about removing that from the Classic new post page?)
Sorry, I love using WP, the CLASSIC WP, and will continue as long as I can continue to get the Classic new post and admin pages.
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@ kokkieh,
It’s more than that. WHILE I’m composing posts I often open my media library, the feedback section, comments, or another post or page in a new tab to check, copy or update something. In the classic editor those options are right there on the screen and it takes me a single click to access them, and the new screen that opens still has the exact same sidebar and basic layout as the main screen I’m working on, so I go on without missing a beat.
Well said. Why would WP introduce a design where to reach the main adminstrative menu with it’s dozens of links and tools you have to go to a different page. Are we to create posts on a split screen to accommodate this new design? But as you mention later in your post it’s not that simple, because the menu at My Sites does not have the same features as the classic sidebar menu.
@ jeremeyduvall,
While creating a page or post I typically use the following sidebar features:Posts: All Posts, Post Categories, Post Tags
Media: Media Library, Add New (Media)
Links: All Links, Add New
Pages: All Pages, Add New (for testing purposes)
Comments
Only two of these ten features is available at My Sites, unless I haven’t yet figured out where the others are hiding. Additionally, I may also use numerous other sidebar links while constructing or editing a post, multitasking. Suppose I want to check or modify widgets, modify settings (on the General, Writing, Reading, Discussion pages), change the custom header, background, or menu. You can’t seriously try to tell me that going to the customizer to check or modify my widgets is a valid alternative to going directly to the widgets page.
Instead of having each of the sidebar links we grown accustomed to, handily available just to the left of the post editor, you’re asking us now to open another page and use a strange menu where the tools with the links with the same and similar labels (blogs posts, pages) open strange pages which do not offer the same ease of use or broad capabilities. My Sites only has 20% of the features I typically use every time I create a page or post, and those features that it has are not as useful or as easy to use as the corresponding features in the classic menu.
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Please, please, please reinstate the old option. As many have written, the new format is difficult and cumbersome, the same data has to be entered repeatedly, the page set up with the draft to the right is not intuitive, the light printing sucks, and the overall experience is disheartening.
I’ve got to believe that some designer or engineer sitting in an alcove has decided for us that this is a great way to go, but from the list of concerns, it’s obvious that its time to concede your error and at least let us have the option of using the old format.
WP in the past prided itself on listening to its community. I hope you get this message!!!
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