I’ve been jonesing for a Medium-style interface for WordPress since the first time I saw their publishing interface. That’s why I was so excited when Barley launched.

Barley is similar to Medium. It’s a paid service you activate and control through your WordPresss dashboard via a plugin. Once it’s installed you can edit your content on the front end—that means you see a post the way your readers do as you’re writing it.

Not long after Barley launched, Mark Jaquith (a lead WordPress developer) announced a new front-end drag-and-drop page layout editor named VelocityPage. This plugin lets you build custom page layouts with a drag-and-drop interface. (Full disclosure: I haven’t tried VelocityPage yet. If you want to see what VelcityPage can do, they have a great demo video.)

Not long after that, Chris Knowles wrote “Why Front-End Editing Is A Drag And Should Be Dropped“. Since I disagreed with a few points in the post, I thought it would be interesting to look at front-end editors from another perspective: a designer’s.