All go ooh and aah at WordPress 2.5
You probably won’t notice from where you are sitting, but I’ve just upgraded to the new WordPress 2.5, without a hitch. There has been a great deal of anticipation of his latest release, but most of the changes you’ll find in this version are not obvious to your blog’s readers. But open the lid and you’ll find the dashboard has had a complete make over, with a whole list of new features.
This is most certainly an upgrade designed to woo bloggers.
A few initial impressions…
It’s easier on the blogger’s eyes
There is a much cleaner dashboard, although most users will take a little time to get used to where everything is again. The Write post/page screen is much improved and the new media buttons are pretty cool. There is a new full screen editor mode for the new Tiny MCE editor.
Great new tools for your photos
The gallery feature designed to replace the old upload system could be a hit with many photobloggers, though I think I’ll stick with flickr for reasons previously stated. Thumbnail and intermediate image sizes are also now configurable.
Quicker (but scarey) plugin upgrades
Automatic Plugin upgrades done automatically at the click of a mouse - WP doanloads the latest version, unpacks the zip file and installs the new version! I had to grit my teeth when I tried this for the first time, but I managed to upgrade several plugins this way without a problem.
Don’t tell me you don’t use WordPress
The rest of the low down on this latest release can be found on the wordpress site. It is sure to improve the experience of bloggers, even if their readers won’t notice. Perhaps the blogosphere will become full of posts from happy and content bloggers as a result.
If by any chance you don’t use WordPress for your blog or church webs site, it’s time you did. And if you are currently paying real money for any other content management or blogging solution - WAKE UP! - and stop pretending the world is flat.
My first impressions were not great - but I think I’ll prefer it the more I use it
It probably takes some getting used to. Time will tell whether it improves the blogger’s work flow.
Thought you might like to know WordPress 2.5 stable works with your Upsilon theme and cformsII v 8.02. WP-Sticky vers 1.1 or 1.3Beta breaks the site. The new WP 2.5 multi-file upload & automatic gallery feature works seems only to work with Firefox 2.0 with Flash enabled, but not IE7 with or without Flash.
The gallery function seems to struggle on my firefox version 2 on the MAC, but fine with safari, weird….
I’ve upgraded 4 of my sites so far, and the one thing that has really frustrated me so far is how complicated they have made moving widgets from one side bar to another. Not complicated as in hard to figure out, but complicated in way too many steps to accomplish. This seems like a major step backwards.
Still deciding on other changes.
I agree, Paul. They’ve dropped the drag and drop interface which was much neater.
There is a patch for WP 2.5 to allow IE7 to upload multiple files. http://trac.wordpress.org/changeset/7573 This is not in the current download, but will probably be in WP 2.5.1
The Upsilon theme does not seem to like the WP 2.5 automatic image galleries. The photos in the gallery seem to carry over the css width formatting from the Smooth Gallery images, instead of the 150×150px or 300×300px specified in the the gallery short code. http://openaranch.com/?p=61
I think the new widget panel will be better suited to and will be more appreciated when themes have widgetized headers, footers, sidebars, main content, etc. Or have specific widgets for specific categories, posts or pages, etc.