I wanted to write up something about the latest WordPress release, version 2.5. I have updated all of the WordPress powered sites that I manage which is more than ten and the upgrade went flawlessly on all sites. Each upgrade was the same, no variances. Why do I mention this part of the process? Well, because I have seen many instances (*cough*Win*cough*dows*cough*) where the same upgrade went very differently (and sometimes even failed) on different computers, even though they had been built or imaged or the application installed off of the same baseline. So, when I can install all of the WordPress upgrades and every one of them not only works, but operates as expected, that’s a big deal to me. This has been the norm in the past as well, not just in this last upgrade.
OK, now that I have that out of the way, let me talk about the features that I have seen that I like.
Probably the biggest thing that I saw that made me excited about this upgrade was the new WYSIWYG editor plugin. It’s actually a nice little tool, and makes writing content that much easier and more friendly. My problem, as I am sure many others have had, is that it mangles any code I put in there. In the end I had to turn it off in order to use anything other than rudimentary html code. Now they claim this new version doesn’t mangle your code, in fact that’s how they phrased it! LOL
The user interface has been vamped up a bit and is really nice. Now, I personally didn’t see anything wrong with the old one, but this new design is an improvement in my humble opinion. Certainly it seems that they are giving you more power and control over your content.
I don’t know about anyone else, but I have always had the problem that I just couldn’t get the text box you enter your post/page verbage into big enough. I like lots of room to write, and now they have added a full screen writing feature. Oh yeah, now we are talking. It’s very nice and quite easy to switch between full screen and normal. I like this one a lot.
Another one is that the search feature now supports searching pages and posts, not just posts. That’s a big improvement too.
All in all, there was a lot of good work put into this latest release and it really is obvious that they developers listened to the users and community (image that!). For more information about WordPress in general, as well as the 2.5 release, go here and read up. It’s a great tool and I would recommend it to anyone.