- Themes: About half of you are satisfied, half want more (or more interesting) themes to be made available. Most want Radio to make it easier and more intuitive to change themes or customize your own theme.
- Templates: Most of you find customizing the templates difficult and nerve-wracking for the non-HTML-savvy. Most said the distinction between the Home and Main template is confusing, and the use of macros is baffling to non-techies. Some said there should be an automatic backup when a user changes a template, and that Radio should offer non-techies a step-by-step metaprocess or table-driven process for changing templates so you don’t need to dip into HTML.
- Blogroll/Navigation Links: Most of you also find this process cumbersome, nerve-wracking and inflexible. Some said there should be an automatic backup when a user changes a navigation link, and that Radio should offer non-techies a step-by-step metaprocess or table-driven process for changing navigation links so you don’t need to dip into HTML. Several of you use Blogrolling tools to maintain navigation links. A few of you would like your RSS subscription feeds to be listed alongside, and maintained the same way as, your blogroll.
- Built-in News Aggregator: A few use this and really like it, a few prefer other aggregation tools like NewzCrawler, NetNewsFile or NewsForFree. Most don’t use this much-touted feature at all, finding the choice of feeds too limited and preferring the flexibility of browsing what and when you want.
- Archiving: Most of you think this is OK. Several want the archive display to be the same period (usually 7 days) as the home page display (with a ‘next/previous’ button), rather than just one day at a time.
- Categories: Most of you find this feature poorly explained and documented and unintuitive, so you don’t use it at all. Once you create categories, it becomes very confusing when you’re working on templates and navigation links to figure out which category’s templates and links you’re changing. Some feel that categories, if overused, unduly complicate blog navigation. Some feel strongly that categories should not appear on the Recently Updated list, only the user’s ‘main’ blog.
- Commenting: (See also Q3 below on editing and deleting comments.) Most of you are satisfied with this, when it’s working. Several of you want more, easier HTML capability in Comments, and an ability to Preview comments before they are Posted. Several want a Notification feature, so you don’t have to browse your own blog to find and review comments, and some would like to be able to side-bar Most Recent Comments.
- WYSIWYG Text Editor: Mac and Mozilla/Netscape users can’t use this, and several others find it limiting (not enough HTML built-in, working area too small, special characters are misrendered). Bottom line: Only a minority use it.
- Outlining: The very few who have tried to use this find the documentation too technical.
- Support: All but one of you find it inadequate: too little, too late, poorly laid out, impersonal, sporadic, ‘minimal’, ‘pathetic’. Several said if the documentation was improved and the product made easier to use, much less support would be needed. The one supporter said that well-articulated problems posted to the Radio discussion board were answered quickly and competently, though it wasn’t clear if the helper was actually with Radio Userland or not.
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Wow, this is just about the exact list of things I came up with over the year I used Radio. I like Radio a lot still, but there were too many stumbling blocks that drove me nuts. The biggest of which was templates, followed by archiving, followed by documentation (lack of).There’s a lot of great stuff there for technical people. But when you compare the docs to something like Movable Type I think MT comes out just a bit ahead (though they need some work too).