net38

The media library is certainly a little confusing, it isn’t obvious from the user interface exactly how it interacts with blog posts. Perhaps at the very least it needs a few notes adding on the “edit media” page.

From experimentation it seems that updating the title, alt and caption fields of a media library entry do not update the blog posts containing that image. The updated values are only used when the image is newly inserted in a post.

If you delete an image library entry then it deletes the central copy which affects all posts containing that image. I would have expected that updating any field of the image library entry similarly updates all posts using it (surely that’s the point of having the library rather than having to doing all image editing via the posts). Not very consistent – the image is a common copy, the attributes are not.

Allowing different attributes for the same image in different posts is of course more flexible. But it would be very cool if the “edit media” page had an option to apply the edit to all posts containing the image.

I’ve recently noticed that the headings output by WordPress are not consistent (I presume this is all controlled by the theme, I’m using the default). Different blogs will have different requirements which heading levels they use, whether to have a flat structure, or a very nested structure. But from the point of view of human readers or search engines it ought to be consistent and logically structured.

I’m using <h3> for subsection headings within my posts because when I view the front page of my blog, or a particular post, WP outputs <h1> for the blog title and <h2> for the post title. So far so good. But if for example you click on a category link, you get <h2> used for the ‘Archive for the X Category’ heading and the post title is now <h3> which means that the <h3> headings in the post are now at the wrong level.

Presumably I could fix this by messing with the theme, but it would be nice if the default theme did something more consistent out of the box.

Posted an entry on my blog about this and other recent experience with WordPress.