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.

Oh, and the gallery

[gallery]
Not bad, but support for lightbox and similar plugins would be nice.

- Regards, Milan

Adobe Photoshop Express (beta)

Yesterday Adobe launched free web based version of their popular photo editing & manipulation software Adobe Photoshop Express. The newest member of the Photoshop family features a basic image editor & gallery (2 GB free at the moment, after beta you should be able to subscribe for more) with functionalities to organize, share and present your masterpieces online. Of course it’s flash based, so iPhone users will still have to wait some kind of iPhotoshop. You can read more about Photosop Express at Ars Technica: Worth 1,000 words: Photoshop Express now free and online.

You can check out my test gallery @ http://milanj.photoshop.com.
– Regards, Milan

Quotes in email replies

John Gruber (Darring Fireball) explains some basics on how we should handle quotes in email replies. You can read it here.

A thought to remember:

The point of quoting isn’t to maintain a self-contained copy of the entire thread in each single message; the point is to provide context for your own remarks.

- Regards, Milan

Je*eš zmago, vi sam tolčite

Olimpija sicer zgublja, a ta komentar Zorana Radisavljeviča me je vseeno skoraj do solz nasmejal:

2. tretjina, 18. minuta:

“Tolče po ploščku in vratarju.”

Kot kaže bo Olimpija finalno serijo le izgubila (leck mich am arsch ÖEHV), a nič hudega… Čestitke za drugo mesto, naj bo to dobra popotnica za naslednje leto.

- LP

Info TV = TV Slo?

Tryin’ to surf to TV Slovenia‘s (Slovenia national TV channel) webpage, I instinctively type www.tvslo.si in browsers URL field. The outcome is quite interesting -> the browser takes me to Info TV (one of Slovenia’s private TV channels) webpage. Info TV’s primary URL is www.infotv.si and TV Slovenia’s correct URL is www.rtvslo.si. The “r” stands for radio, Radio-television Slovenia – RTV Slovenia.

I wonder how many visitors comes to Info TV’s webpage thru tvslo.si domain? Anyway, isn’t this kind of URL hijacking somehow pathetic?

P.S.: Digging deeper.. I wonder why infotv.si (without “www”) is asking for my car registration number (attached screenshot)? The site title says: “Check car registration number”. Hmm..? But don’t get your hopes up on maybe discovering which is the color of your car, inquiry will leave you with an SQL error.