leesalazar

Improve usability for journalists/writers.

I Am Not A Programmer, but I’ve been using WordPress since version 1.5 or so. I’ve seen redesigns of the Add/Edit Post/Page UI that struck me as more attractive and usable than previous versions, and yet I’ve always experienced writing on WordPress as quite repulsive and discouraging. Still do.

(Writing on some other app and then copy-pasting or importing into WordPress is also pretty repulsive.)

The Add/Edit UI is built on a certain paradigm of How We Write, and that paradigm is completely unnatural to me. The existing paradigm enables writers who start at the beginning and go until they reach the end. If you tend to write the middle or final paragraph first, you end up scrolling a great deal. …And my writing is even less linear than that, but I can think of a few changes that would help many nonlinear writers without breaking anything for the linear writers:

* A button to toggle an expanded and editable view of the draft in the Add/Edit Post screen.

As a result, scrolling the add/edit page would mean scrolling the article I’m writing. This may also be an improvement for users with disabilities?

* Split a draft Post into multiple Posts (also in the Add/Edit Post screen).

In Adobe Acrobat, you can split a PDF along its top-level bookmarks with just a couple of clicks of the mouse/keyboard. I’d like a similar capability in WordPress.

Say I’m writing a very long article and I suddenly realize it should be four separate articles. I’d like to insert a <!–split–> in the appropriate places of the draft, then press publish. WordPress publishes the top section of the article, down to the first <!–split–>, and dumps each of the remaining three sections into a new draft Post.

* Concatenate drafts with just a couple of button clicks in the Edit Posts screen.

The Excerpt View option is a helper here, but a Full Text View would be even better.

* Full Text View.

In which you’d see all the text of each post listed, with paragraph/line breaks. (One hopes that the full text will be as wide as the entire list/table, rather than merely the width of the title column, as Excerpt View does now.)

These last two changes would make the Edit Posts screen into a rudimentary pasteboard/corkboard for users who need a visual metaphor to help them organize their text.

* all of the above for Pages (and Custom Post Types?), too.

[Deleted digression about mind-mapping and note-taking apps, etc. I have many thoughts, y’all.]