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So What’s New In WordPress 2.5.x?

In the beginning, everyone was excited about the news of the release of WordPress 2.5 but just when it was about to make its official debut on March 10, 2008, the release date was pushed back crushing the hope of millions of bloggers worldwide waiting anxiously for its release. Now, the latest stable release of WordPress (Version 2.5.1) is available for download at http://wordpress.org/download/

However, as of the time of release, it’s still in its early copy and was still under some concluding rounds of testing the program and also tweaking it; but it is now stable enough to provide you with a quick overview of some of the feature changes and additions, along with a brief comparison against its predecessor, WordPress 2.3.x series. It’s time to change!

i) The Dashboard

The very first thing you laid eyes on will be the dashboard which is similar to the hub of your blog. The new dashboard now not only features a sleek and more focused design but also comes with a few colour schemes which has switched from very cool, cool blues to the even colder icy blue, sexy dark grey and exotic burnt orange. The other change you will notice right away is the content’s layout. You will no longer have the content on your left and the blog statistics on your right but now you have a single column which has some quick links to the post composing screens, followed by blog stats, any recent comments you received, incoming links and lastly aggregated feeds.

On the plus side, now you can customize the feeds to the feeds that you want to see at a glance. Thus, you are no longer restricted to feeds from the WordPress development blog or WordPress planet. You’ll also be able to personalize your incoming links display such as from Google Blog Search to Technorati.

ii) The Navigation Menu

The navigation menu also has been changed from the straight forward menu of items in WordPress 2.3.x to a reduced menu with a few menu items completely renamed. While Write, Manage, Design, and Comments could be found in the usual spot, but the Plugins, Users, and Settings are now in the mid-upper right corner. The name changes are Presentation to Design, Options has become Settings and Blogroll renamed to Links and can be found under Manage. Under Write, there is also a Link navigation item where you’ll be able to add links to your blogroll.

iii) The Post and Page

The write pages have also undergone complete overhauls, leaving power bloggers who has grown accustomed to the many of the advanced WordPress features such as tags, categories, and trackbacks to do quite a bit of scrolling. Gone is also the option to drag and drop items in the order you’d prefer as you could in version 2.3.x. However, you may find a cool new addition which is the media manager. Currently, it only supports uploading from your computer but soon, there will be an option to add media from popular services such as YouTube and Flickr.

iv) The Post/Page Management

The Manage page no longer has the manual one at a time posts delete or clicking on the Edit link next to a particular entry. In version 2.5.x, to edit post, instead of edit link, just click on the post title while to view posts with a particular tags listed on the Manage page, just click on the tag and WordPress will list all those posts, the same with clicking on the author or category. As an added bonus, you can now mass delete entries.

The date format has also changed to sporting a user friendly “2 hours ago” as opposed to an actual date. After a 24 hour period, it will change to the usual date format. Besides that, you’ll also be able to see the posts’ tags and publication status.

v) The Edit Post Page

Most notable change is the “View this Post” button which has replaced the “preview” link that was hidden between the title and post content. In addition, you’re also able to quickly edit the post slug on the fly. Finally, there’s a quick link for deletion that enables the users to quickly delete their posts and there is an option to view the comments associated with the post, all comments, or even all posts.

vi) The Tag Management

Under Manage, you’ll probably see a brand new sub-menu named Tags. It allows you to do some basic tag management such as adding, editing, or deleting individual tags similar to category management page.

vii) The Media Management

The other new link appearing under the Manage tab is called Media Library, which has replaced Upload, and it’s where you can find and manage each of your uploaded files. WordPress is now supporting a multitude of file formats, such as video and audio.

viii) The Widgets Management

There will also be no need for you to click on any particular widgets onto the sidebar because you now can click on an Add link next to it and it is added! Once it’s already on the sidebar, then you’re free to click and drag however you want them to be arranged. To help beginners, each widget now comes with a brief description detailing what the widget does and widget filters as well as a search function (in case you lose track).

ix) The Other Changes

First, the user filters have been improved a little and clicking on a specific role’s link will only display users with that particular role. Secondly, WordPress will now show you exactly how many comments you have waiting for review in the navigation menu so you no longer have to click on comments to discover them. Third, there is an option (you can also disable it) to support avatars straight out of the box.
In conclusion, this version seems to be heading in the correct direction which has improved over the previous version with several small, yet significant changes to WordPress. For the most part, most people will either love it or hate it. But one thing for sure is WordPress will certainly leave a lot of commotion in its wake.