I’m not sure how many people have moved to Wordpress 2 (I know you have John, which means that Tone has, too) but there’s some things I find pretty annoying about it.

For one, I despise the WYSIWYG editor in the new Write screen. I also don’t care for the RSS feeds in the new Dashboard. Overall, I just don’t like the look and feel of the new admin panel at all. If you’re like me, here’s some things to help.

First, disable that damnable WYSIWYG editor. Go to Users -< Your Profile and look for a checkbox near the bottom that says “Use the visual rich editor when writing” and uncheck that bad boy. That will revert you back to the old style post screen; something I like much better than that rich text editor.

The RSS feeds that are loaded on the main Dashboard page are SLLLOOOOOWWWW and really don’t belong there. It wouldn’t be that harsh if there were a way to remove them or modify them from within the interface, but there isn’t. The only choice you get without modifying WP core files is what the wordpress developers deem worthy. Not cool guys. I suggest using Angsuman’s WordPress 2.0 / 1.5.x Dashboard Replacement. It replaces the /wp-admin/index.php file, a WP core file, but I think it’s worth it since my Dashboard can take up to a minute to load because of all the RSS feeds it has to grab. Maybe the developers should consider making that a tweakable option instead of forcing us to endure what they think is useful.

Next on my hit list is the admin panel look. The admin panel itself isn’t bad, I just don’t care for the new colors and such. To fix that, I suggest Tiger Style Administration, an admin panel replacement that’s reminiscent of Mac OSX. It’s got a less cluttered feel and just looks nice. It also performs faster for me.

I’m still looking for a way to use the old-style Press It popup instead of the full page redirect one. If anyone has any ideas on that one, I’m all ears.