@Jane Wells – Marybeth tested the site using all of the logins provided by the WordPress team, including both subscriber and administrator.
While I believe that Marybeth was logged in as a subscriber in the particular clip that I showed in the presentation, she had just as much trouble using the Dashboard when logged in as an administrator. In fact, the plethora of new options available to her at that level was even more confusing to her.
The point of the clip that I showed in the presentation was not to illustrate any lack of functionality at the subscriber level, rather it was to show how easy it was for a novice user to inadvertently leave the dashboard and go to one of the WordPress.org development blogs.
I will soon be releasing all of the video from the Joomla! and WordPress user evaluation sessions as soon as I go through them and make sure that no passwords are revealed in them. Marybeth has also agreed to re-evaluate all three sites after reviewing documentation and training material provided by the teams, and we’ll be releasing the results of that by the end of April.
As far as the criticism that the spec may have been influenced by my experience with Drupal, all I can say is that in my nearly 15 years of experience working with the Web, I’ve worked with a wide variety of CMS platforms, including both Drupal and WordPress, which I used to power my wedding blog. The functionality that we asked for in the spec was intended to be representative of a wide array of common Web social networking tools, and included a number of items that posed significant challenges for the Drupal team.
After having received a lot of criticism early on for including WordPress in the challenge and being told that “it wasn’t really a CMS”, I have to say that the WP team shattered a lot of stereotypes with their fantastic site, and one of the comments I heard several times coming out of the presentation was, “I didn’t realize that WordPress could do all that”. Again, I think the team deserves a lot of credit for proving the skeptics wrong, and establishing once and for all that WP is a system that can compete at the same level as Drupal or Joomla!
