Wordpress 2.5: first impressions

The long awaited WordPress 2.5 has officially been released yesterday.

Official statement from Wordpress Blog:

WordPress 2.5, the culmination of six months of work by the WordPress community, people just like you. The improvements in 2.5 are numerous, and almost entirely a result of your feedback: multi-file uploading, one-click plugin upgrades, built-in galleries, customizable dashboard, salted passwords and cookie encryption, media library, a WYSIWYG that doesn’t mess with your code, concurrent post editing protection, full-screen writing, and search that covers posts and pages.

As explained in the statement, the list of improvements, mostly new features aimed towards better user experience is long. Some most important ones are:

New Dashboard, reorganized and with new fresh look
New Dashboard Homepage with widget support
Multi-file upload with progress bar (gotta love this one)
Built-in galleries & support for EXIF extraction (cool, photoblogers gonna love this)
Integrated tag management
Semi-automatic plugin upgrades
Password strength meter

You can read more about it here, but be sure to check out 4-minute screen-cast of the new interface in action (by Matt).

Let’s get busy

A lot of Wordpress users will probably wait for some feedback on the upgrade experience. I, - for once -, wasn’t worried too much about upgrade problems because, since rebirth of this blog, I have been using only two plugins. And the plugins are usually the biggest issue when upgrading Wordpress, right? Btw., how many of you really disables all the plugins before the upgrade? :)

The upgrade procedure is simple as with previous version - you need to replace some files, take care of the wp-content folder, direct your browser towards the upgrade page and let the Wordpress engine do it’s magic. You will find complete upgrade instructions here and if you are new to wordpress go here & here. For me the upgrade went without a glitch and my blog was back up and running in a matter of minutes.

First impressions

The Dashboard
The redesigned light blue & dark grey dashboard is a beauty for eye and easy to use. What everyone will notice first is that navigation bar is now divided into to parts. On the left side there are the most common panes for publishing and managing content (Write, Manage, Design, Comments) and the right side is reserved for not so frequently used preference panes (Settings, Plugins, Users). The new Dashboard Homepage is now actually a series of widget, so you can add different plugins, like this statistics plugin, to it.

Widgets & Tags
Widgets have been integrated into Wordpress since since 2.2, but WP 2.5 comes with 13 preloaded widgets, including Tag Cloud widget. Under Manage > Tags now you can completely control all the tags inside your blog. No extra plugins needed.

Multi-file upload & Media library
I’m one of those users frequently frustrated with not being able to upload multiple pictures at once. With WP 2.5 this is now possible. More than that, WP 2.5 now features Media Library system, with support for adding and managing pictures, videos and audio files and a gallery subsystem which you can use to easily show set of pictures on your blog. You can find sample gallery in the bottom of this post. But wait all you photobloggers, that’s not all. WP 2.5 can also extract and present EXIF information from your images. How cool is that?

Semi-automatic plugin upgrades
WP 2.5 won’t just notify you about your plugins being out of date. It will also download and install latest versions for you. All you will have to do for it is click, click and click. That’s all.

Write Post pane & better Visual Editor
All the panes in dashboard are more or less redesigned in WP 2.5. But lets focus on one, where every blogger spends most of his time - the Write Post pane. It has been redesigned to be more writer friendly, but the biggest improvement comes for those users who rely on Visual Editor. You will be happy to hear that Visual Editor is now much improved. It uses TinyMCE 3.0 now and is thus also more compatible with Safari - which is good news for all us mac users. And quoting WP developers: “It (Visual Editor) doesn’t mess with your code anymore”. Even I’m in dilemma after getting taste of it. Should I stick to classic HTML editor os use the Visual Editor?

Conclusion

Wordpress 2.5 is a major upgrade and you shuld not fear & wait to upgrade your blog to it. Just go for it, you won’t regret it. WP 2.5 definitively makes blogging even more fun.