On and off for the past week I’ve been re-working my current design. I was completely happy with just about all of it, but there were a few things (like adding my twitter status back in) that I just hadn’t gotten around to doing. I also monitor the response times for my site, and noticed that they had blown out since going to the new design, so I wanted to make some changes to try and counteract that.

With the release of WordPress 2.5-RC1 earlier this week I figured that the long weekend over Easter would be a good time to upgrade WP, and launch my revised design. So thats exactly what I’ve spent most of the afternoon doing. Most of that time was waiting for the full backup of my blog and forum to download, after that it was all fairly quick.

WordPress 2.5-RC1 and Fluency Admin

Its been a while in the making, mainly because they skipped 2.4, but WP2.5 finally landed earlier this week even if it was just the release candidate. By far the most obivous change to the average user is the overhauled admin interface. It is a huge improvement over previous versions, and overall I don’t mind it…but.

But, after using Steve Smith’s Tiger Admin plugin for the past year and a bit I had become very used to, among other things, having my menus down the left side. I tested Tiger admin with an earlier build of WP2.5, and it was pretty clear that the two weren’t going to play nice together. Which is exactly why I put together Fluency.

And now that I’m actively using WP2.5 with Fluency I’m more likely to pick up on any little bits and pieces that I’ve either missed completely, or those bits that have changed since I released version 1 (such as the menu in the add media HUD.) If you spot anything submit a bug and I’ll check it out. There will be an updated version once WP2.5-final is out.

The redesign thats not a redesign

I see it as more of an evolution of the design. Yes at first glance it looks quite different, but in reality not much has changed. I’ve dropped the rather large and bright orange ‘grunge’ style header graphic in place of a simpler, calmer header. Overall the design is even more white and clean that before, I’ve increased padding and margins around some items to add some more clean space.

One of the most obvious changes is the shift of the sidebar from the left to the right, and at the same time the whole page is centered in the window as opposed to being left aligned. There were couple of reason for switching the sidebar across to the right, mainly due to the load order of the page. For example if flickr is down (rare, but its is occassionally quite slow) the pages ‘hangs’ while it tries to load the widget. Now, the content is always loaded before the sidebar so, at worst, you can still read the content.

One of the less noticeable changes is that there is a little more variance in the colours I’ve used. Most of the link, or hover, colours remain orange as before, but I’ve made some green (to match the new logo), and in some sections I’ve coloured them to match which section they are in. Take for example the flickr images in the sidebar. Hover over them and you’ll see the first three have blue outlines, the fourth has a pink outline. Just a small thing to make it match the familiar flickr logo.

I’ve also added a new plugin called wp-typogrify which as the name implies helps with the typography of blog entries and titles. The changes is make are only small, but are visually pleasing.

Further optimisations

For some reason (ok, I know it one of the plugins I use) both prototpye and jquery are being loaded. Great. But I’m not using them. I’m sure there is no GOOD reason that I should need to load 150kb+ of javascript when the same things could be achieved much more efficiently…I’m having trouble even identifying what some plugins are using these libraries for. I’m going to seriously look at removing the dependency on these libraries form the plugins, or at least finding a much more compact alternative.