Take A Sneak Peek At WordPress 2.5
Mar 18 2008 
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Matt Mullenweg, founding developer of WordPress, has announced on the WordPress development blog that WordPress 2.5 “could be released today.” However, we all know that’s not going to happen! Still, he’s keeping your interest by releasing a ‘Sneak Peek’ download so that developers can test what’s to come in one of the most anticipated releases from WordPress.
The software is basically done and stable, and could be released today, but we’d like to incorporate feedback from a wider audience before making it available to the general public. After a few days of your feedback we’ll set a final release date. Personally, I can’t wait.
Upgrades To Expect in WordPress 2.5
- A customizable dashboard
- Multi-file upload
- Built-in galleries
- One-click plugin upgrades
- Tag management
- Built-in Gravatars
- Full text feeds
- Faster load times
Thoughts On WP 2.5
I’m looking forward to the customizable dashboard and one click plugin upgrades. The latter is something that has always bothered me when dealing with WordPress. Here’s a screenshot of what the new dashboard should resemble.
The new Dashboard is focused on the most relevant tasks at hand: a quick summary of what’s published and scheduled for publication, the latest comments and incoming links, blog stats, and WordPress updates and news. You can add your own RSS feeds and edit the way information is presented so that the new Dashboard conforms to the way you use WordPress.
According to the announcement, the dashboard is one of the ignored features of the WordPress platform. Well Matt, it’s just not very informative. Maybe if more stats and graphs were added we’d pay more attention to it.
However, I’m loving this new interface, but, still want native stats and graphs! It’s so clean and just seems a lot more useful than the current WordPress dashboard.I think this new style and activity layout will have me checking the dashboard a lot more.
[...] we’ve cut the number of navigation options in half, separating the primary functions (writing, managing posts and pages, editing the blog’s design, and managing comments) from secondary functions. This presents information at a more comfortable pace, revealing only the information that’s necessary.[...]
Everything you need is still there — just better organized. (Especially for people new to WP.)
The style scheme you see pictured is integrated across the board. I think the release will please a lot of users in the eye candy department. Very Googly/Web 2.0-ish Matt! Overall, I’m quite impressed and definitely looking forward to the upgrade! Looks like the company really listened to it’s users in this one!
***UPDATE: Head over here to view the WordPress 2.5 Demo Site!
How about you: What do you think of WordPress 2.5? Will it fail? Or does it have enough potential to succeed?
Sneak Peek and Download of WordPress 2.5 RC1
Technorati tags: WordPress, wordpress 2.5, matt mullenweg
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I updated my blog to the current dev version from the subversion repository. It seems stable enough. I like the new design. Much cleaner and less ‘babyish’ than the original. It looks more like a mature application now.
My personal favourite feature is the ability to automatically update plugins that use the wordpress.org plugin hosting. It will tell you when an update is available, download it and update locally.
The post/page editing is nice too. The new layout is much more intuitive and the editor is more featured. I’m liking it, it’s a much bigger update than a lot of the previous releases.
Great write-up, Corvida.
I think that 2.5 will be a success, just like previous versions of WP. There will be some things that people love, and some things that people hate.
The things that people hate will be addressed in upcoming releases.
Things that I like: Full text RSS feeds without having to use a plugin, one-click plugin updates, and “faster” load times.
I’m excited about this but am worried about stability. When is it rock solid enough to do the upgrade? What else should I do other than back up my posts? This is scary! Do I have to worry about plug in compatibility?
@Elliott NG – I have your same concerns about 2.5. Since I’ve read Glenn Slaven’s comment I’m very much tempted to just do the upgrade now, which I’m thinking might’ve been Matt Mullenweg’s plan all along when released the RC.
Say it’s an RC when it could most definitely be an actual release of WordPress 2.5.
i’m diggin this! looks extremely clean (preferred). i hope those darn google ads are not going to be in the mix!
We switched GoMo News from typepad to Word press one month ago and I am amazed at the difference. There are still a couple of hiccups but all in all – very happy. Bena
All my plugins still worked, the update was pretty transparent as far as the font-end of my blog was concerned. I uploaded all the new files & it just worked. The first time I accessed wp-admin it prompted me with the usual update the database page, but that worked fine too. I’ve not seen any reason to not update now.
Note: I accept no responsibility if your server burns to the ground because you updated :)
Huh. Because I am shallow, I’m going to miss the dark blue theme. I like the one-click plugin update, though. I hate having to download latest versions of plugins. Not like I do that constantly.
I’m most likely to wait a few months before upgrading. To ensure everything works fine and has been streamlined and perfected. What?