My site got hacked — fortunately in a way that wasn’t visible to visitors — so I upgraded my site to the latest WordPress release. This is the first time in my long relationship with WordPress that I’ve been unhappy with an upgrade: the dashboard is really hard to use. Buttons don’t look like buttons; there are so many links and options on every screen; some links are underlined, others are not; some elements stretch across the browser window, others are fixed-width; there’s too much contrast between certain elements, and not enough contrast between others.

The experience, sad to say, is approaching Vista-like proportions — in this case, though, I don’t have a stable, secure XP to fall back on.

Given the proclivity to make everything in WordPress configurable and skinnable, I wouldn’t be surprised to see “Dashboard themes” in a future version. I also wouldn’t be surprised to see a far simpler upstart blogging engine start to chip at WordPress’s market share.