« Blimey | ::: | It was 363 days ago… »
WordPress 2.5
The latest incarnation of WordPress got a step closer to general availability today, with the unveiling of Release Candidate 1. Being the “must have the latest”-type, I downloaded it as soon as I heard about it.
With a little bit of forward planning, though, I have not loaded it on to this site but have installed it locally using MAMP; this means I can run it (pretty much) as it if was on a remote web server but have it on my machine here. That way, when it all goes wrong, the real Wolfs Howl doesn’t suffer.
I had a previous installation of WordPress on my local machine, but I deleted that and started from scratch, just to see what happened. Once the files were copied across, the install process was the usual simple process. Once logged in, you’re immediately hit by the visual differences (which some people are going to love, others will hate, and I’m undecided about) but what are the differences from a usability point of view?
Well, the first thing to notice is that tags now seem to be fully integrated into the system. For a long time, categories and tags were synonymous as far as WordPress were concerned. When they wised up and realised that isn’t the case, they introduced limited support (you could create them, but you couldn’t catalogue them) and now tag support comes of age. You can now interact with your tags the same way you do your categories.
The next thing which is fairly major if you’re a Safari user is that the Visual Editor seems to work - no more stripping out line breaks! This won’t be any benefit to all you IE and Firefox users, but for Safari users it’s a compelling reason to upgrade. (At least, it works with Safari 3.1 which has just been released).
There seems to have been a general “tidying up” of the admin area, with more separation between various parts but I’m not sure how successful this has been. It’s not illogical (or at least no more illogical than before), but it could still be better. One of those things, I guess, that you get used to. Most pages, too, are now laid out slightly differently, but with the same functionality in evidence and nothing really ground-breakingly new. The Dashboard screen is better organised and puts more of your content at the top - rather than marginalising it and taking up all the space with news about WordPress as the previous version did.
On the “Manage Posts” screen, you no longer see the post ID - which may be important to you or it may not - and there’s no longer an obvious “edit” button. To edit a post, you click its title. Not difficult to figure out, perhaps, but I wonder why the edit button had to disappear? What you do get, though, on this screen is the added information of which tags the post uses.
Of course, being new, not all of the plug-ins I favour are working yet; Defensio is (and I assume that Akismet will be too, if you must insist on using that), but a number of others that I like are not yet 100% functional. This is to be expected, as the plug-in authors will not have had much of a chance to update their work, and from what I’ve read elsewhere while most of the visible changes to WordPress seem to be purely cosmetic, there has been a lot of work under the bonnet which has fundamentally changed the way some things work - and it has broken plug-ins along the way.
Overall, I’m still undecided. I need to find out more about what’s gone on under the bonnet to know if this latest release is really worthwhile. There’s a couple of things I immediately like, but that’s more because they’re bug fixes rather than new features. Once updated versions of all the plug-ins I use are available, I’ll try loading WordPress 2.5 on a live server and really start working with it, but until then I’m sticking with 2.3.
Comments
3 Responses to “WordPress 2.5”
I think you know what to do....
Wolfs Stuff
Wolfs Helpers
I’m really glad that you have 2.5 up and running and have taken the time to review and explain what the changes are. This is helpful.
Thanks.
[Wolfie edit: I've removed a smiley from this comment, because for some reason they really screw up the way the comment is displayed]
Wolfie, glad to have your take on things. I too am running MAMP except with 2.3.3 so that I can tweak CSS without messing up my blog. I’m very glad to hear the editor is working with Safari 3. The thing is, that over the past few months is that the same issues people have been experiencing with Safari have leached over and into IE and Firefox. This is recorded in both the wordpress.com and .org forums. I’m hoping the editor issues, across all platforms, will go away when the update hits .com.
My take on the interface was the same as yours, but I haven’t said a lot about it since I haven’t actually played with it yet. WP needs a good GUI guru.
[...] it as “awaiting RC feedback” - despite being announced for a 17 March roll-out. Since writing about it a few days ago, I’ve really not touched it much but I’ve noticed that the updated [...]