GrantPalin.com

One of the good things about WP is that it is updated fairly regularly, in the form of bug and security fixes. And one or two times a year, the WP team puts out a major update, which usually includes several new features.

The interesting thing about this update is that the last major update was 2.3 - the team decided they were making enough changes to the core that warranted a jump to version 2.5, bypassing 2.4 altogether. That should say something about the new goodies in this release!

Admin Interface

Probably the main feature of WP 2.5 is the revamped backend administration section. It last got facelifted about 2 versions back, and has worked well since then. However, it was a little dark-ish and crowded-looking. It becomes much lighter, much less crowded in WP 2.5. It just seems more usable. The dashboard in particular - as your entry point to the administration section - is easier to use.

One thing I don’t like about it now is that on the write page, the boxes that used to be in the right-hand column, are now below the main editing panel, forcing you to scroll up and down. Oops, not so usable. One example of this is the categories list - I’m just too used to that being in the sidebar.

Some people don’t like the new colours much, but it works for me - I actually like the variety, as long as it doesn’t get too varied.

One-Click Plugin Upgrades

Another welcome new feature is the automated updating of plugins. It used to be a chore to have to download, then upload, new versions of plugins being used. But the plugins panel has links to automatically update plugins for which newer versions are available - without manual intervention. Sweeeet! This worked for all the plugins I am currently using, without issues.

There have been warnings on various sites cautioning against using this feature, as some plugins may, again for various reasons, not work too well through automatic updating. Darren Ethier goes into the issue in some detail.

Other Changes

• No longer need a plugin to search pages - WP < 2.5 would only search posts, and not pages. I used to use the Search Everything plugin for this, but it is redundant now.
• More complete tagging support. WP 2.3 didn’t have any built-in tag management capabilities, requiring the use of plugins.
• Built-in galleries - in previous versions, generally a plugin was needed to be able to add image galleries to individual posts. This release allows us to upload images and directly add a gallery to a post. I’ve included a couple of recent photos in this post as proof of this capability. The available functionality is very slick, much better than what I had used before.
• Related to the point above you can now upload multiple files at a time, thanks to a slick Flash-based uploader. You even get a nice progress bar for each image.

For a more official look at the new release, have a look at the news release.

So far, so good with this upgrade. Now that the new WP is in place, I think it’s time I did some spring cleaning on this site. I really gotta get that new look up on here, and get back to work on those half-done posts of mine…