WordPress 2.5

Word­Press 2.5 is here! Actu­ally, the ubiq­ui­tous blog­ging soft­ware has been out for about a cou­ple of weeks now, I’m just a lit­tle late on the upgrade.

It’s been quite a while since we’ve seen a new release from the Automat­tic guys (as well as the open source com­mu­nity). After a bit of a delay, the shrink wrap is finally off, and we can finally see what all this wait­ing around had been for.

One of the the major focus points of this release is the new back­end admin­is­tra­tion. It’s been heav­ily revised and I think it’s for the bet­ter. Here are some of the changes as detailed by Word­Press cre­ator Matt Mullenweg.

For more infor­ma­tion on the changes, the Word­Press blog also fea­tures a break­down of the main user fea­tures that are new to Word­Press 2.5.

Even though I’m a bit slow to the table, here are my thoughts on Word­Press 2.5:

Upgrad­ing

The upgrad­ing process was com­pletely pain­less (as usual). It was a smooth install that took less then 15 min­utes to man­u­ally backup every­thing in mul­ti­ple for­mats, dis­able plu­g­ins, upload, re-install, reset all the settings/plugins/themes, and finally upgrade all out of date plu­g­ins. I was wor­ried that my K2 theme wouldn’t play nice with the new Word­Press and its wid­gets, but a nightly K2 release did the trick. It has worked flawlesly so far. Great job by both the K2 and Word­Press guys.

New Admin Look

The new admin­is­tra­tion design is very nice over­all. It’s sim­ple and fairly clean (there is a lot to pack in there these days). This ver­sion dra­mat­i­cally changed the admin lay­out, and I think it’s for the bet­ter. For the sea­soned Word­Press vet it’s a bit tough to find cer­tain things at first. But the learn­ing curve isn’t steep, and any­one who is used to the old Word­Press lay­out can rest assured they will be flu­ent in no time.

Prob­lems

The max width of the admin pages and the menus are two things that really need to be changed in the next revi­sion of Word­Press. Nar­row widths in the admin pages are appar­ently by design, but for peo­ple with widescreen mon­i­tors like myself, posi­tion­ing the page off to the left is unac­cept­able. Luck­ily there is a plu­gin to solve the prob­lem: the Remove Max Width plu­gin does just what it says.

Inac­ces­si­ble sub menus have also plagued Word­Press since it’s hum­ble begin­nings. There is a plu­gin which solves this prob­lem as well, aptly named the Admin Drop Down Menu. It was recently updated to work with ver­sion 2.5 and I think it does a great job.

The whole 2.5 appli­ca­tion does seem faster then 2.3, how­ever, once you’ve enabled a few plu­g­ins, the expe­ri­ence still starts to feel a bit slug­gish. Not much more to be said here, the issues and any improve­ments are a bit out of my league.

Finally, the new default colour scheme leaves a lot to be desired. It’s mostly the bright orange that throws me off. One of the first things I did was switch back to the old Word­Press blues (which isn’t great, but it is far bet­ter then the new colours).

Alter­na­tives

Hav­ing been a fan of the Word­Press Tiger Admin in the past, I’m not opposed to rad­i­cal admin design changes. The above men­tioned max width prob­lems prompted me to take a quick peak at Flu­ency, a new Word­Press admin theme. While I did like some of the changes that were made, it just didn’t feel like Word­Press to me any­more. So it’s back to the tried and true until I can find a rea­son­able compromise.

Lots of New Features

There are tons of new tweaks and fea­tures in Word­Press 2.5, the major­ity are explained here. For the most part every­thing is still going very smoothly here at the Sean Buck­ley Blog. How­ever, I have just expe­ri­enced some prob­lems with the new “media upload­ing” options. Try­ing to embed a YouTube video like the one above should be a sim­ple process. Video like YouTube is hugely pop­u­lar and it’s some­thing that is essen­tial for a blog these days. Try as I might, I could not get the YouTube link­ing sys­tem to prop­erly dis­play YouTube video (I should note that this could be a plu­gin or theme issue). I have ended up going back to using Viper’s Video Quick­tags (which works fairly well, but the func­tion­al­ity should be built right into WordPress).

The auto update for plu­g­ins is amaz­ing. It’s such a time saver. So sim­ple and so effec­tive. This is prob­a­bly my favorite new fea­ture of 2.5. I think that in the near future the devel­op­ers should have this same kind of func­tion­al­ity for themes. I would also like to see a noti­fi­ca­tion of some kind in the dash­board to show when updated plu­g­ins are available.

In Sum­mary

Word­Press 2.5 it a great appli­ca­tion and a huge step for­ward in its devel­op­ment life. The new fea­tures are great and the minor annoy­ances that do crop up are eas­ily fix­able. There is still work to be done, but I think you can­not find a bet­ter blog­ging plat­form out there today. It you are still wait­ing to upgrade for some rea­son, I rec­om­mend get­ting to it.

Those of you who aren’t to famil­iar with Word­Press (and are still red­ing this post), and feel like see­ing what all this blog­ging fuss is about, you can try out Word­Press for your­self. It’s is avail­able for down­load here. Remem­ber, you do need a host­ing ser­vice to run the stand alone Word­Press install, so if you don’t have a web host (or you just want to start out with the basics), WordPress.com offers a sim­ple hosted solu­tion sim­i­lar to ser­vices like Blog­ger.