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Making the switch
Despite what I said in my previous post, I’ve gone and updated my WordPress installation to 2.5. The trigger for this was that one of the plug-ins I’d been waiting for (Ozh’s Absolute Comments) has now been updated. I used Fantastico to do the update - so much quicker than downloading the new version and then uploading it to my server (why does FTP take so long?) - and all went smoothly.
Having now used 2.5 in anger, as it were, rather than just on a local install I’ve been able to give it a bit more of a test and to find a bunch of things that I don’t think are really all that good. Let me run you through some of them:
Colour scheme: that new default colour scheme is so wishy-washy. It looks like its been left out in the sun too long. First job I did was to head to Users \ Your Profile and change to the classic colour scheme, which is at least a little better.
Dashboard: this has been improved - a bit more focus on your blog, rather than Wordpress - and is now widgetised. What you don’t get, though, is any way to manage the widgets. You can edit some of them, so that they show you different content, but you can’t turn them on or off. So another plug-in was called for - Dashboard Widget Manager. This is a great little plug-in that lets you control the Dashboard widgets in the same way as you do the widgets on your blog. So I’ve turned off most of the widgets now and have a lovely streamlined Dashboard.
Tags: when I first looked at 2.5, I thought it was great that they’d finally properly integrated tags as well as categories (after so long of WordPress thinking they were interchangeable items). But when you use the online editor to write a post, you don’t get a list of previously defined tags to choose from, so it becomes a little pointless to keep a track of them.
Widgets: this one seems to have been giving some people on Wordpress.com a bit of trouble. Management of widgets has had a major overhaul and, while on the whole it is not too bad (really just a re-designed layout) the one big bugbear with it is that you can only see one sidebar at a time. Fine if your blog only has one sidebar, but a pain if you have two. I quite like the new layout, but would prefer to be able to see both sidebars at the same time like I could with 2.3.
I’m sure there must be some good things about 2.5 that I haven’t come across yet (and there are a couple that I’ve already noticed - better support for Safari when using the Visual Editor and an attempt to offer tag management) and when I find them I’ll you know.
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