Wordpress 2.5 Review

Wordpress 2.5 is a radical improvement on previous versions and I am very pleased with the outcome. Wordpress for a long time has been the biggest blogging platform but the admin area wasn’t that nice to use, things just didn’t look nice, well this has changed dramatically in wordpress 2.5.

In this review I am going to show you some of the main features of the new version, this is from the culmination of playing around with the new wordpress for about half an hour so I may miss some things, so I apologise in advance.

New Design
The new design uses a nice combination of dark gray, white and a sky blue colours and really makes wordpress a pleasure to use. It has kept the tab layout it used to have but has spaced some of the items out a bit, for example, the dashboard link is now a text link at the very top left of each page. It also has a lot of smooth animations, for example on the widgets page, when you edit a widget instead of in previous versions where it put a lightbox over the page and show a little area with the widget settings, it expands in a nice smooth action and pushes down the widgets underneath. They have applied the design on the main site as well: http://wordpress.org/

Dashboard
Screenshot: click here

The dashboard has a selection of widgets which you can edit, you can have your visitor stats on this page which is a new development and of course it shows stats like number of posts etc. It’s all nicely set out like a lot of the new admin area is, nothing is cluttered into small places anymore.

Posting
Posting has become a much better experience. In previous versions there were a lot of formatting issues, these have been fixed and now what you write is actually what you get when you view it on the blog. There is still the HTML option if you want to go that way.

You can add media such as images, videos and music much easier now and even manage it easier, it is a lot more user friendly. You can upload multiple images and add a selection to a post and it will display the thumbnails in the post. When a user clicks on a thumbnail it will take them to the image as if it was a separate post and they can even comment on the image.

If you are working on a long post and want more space for writing you can now make the writing area full screen which gives you more than enough space, as if you were writing in a word processor. A nice addition because a lot of people write really long posts and that little box was never enough space to do anything, especially if you were adding images to your posts.

Tags make a come back in wordpress 2.5 and this time they work. Adding them is simple and it has intellisense so that if you already have a tag you can add it by selecting it from a list, just makes it much quicker.

All the usual stuff is still there, it is just much nicer set out, making it much easier and nicer to use, to view a screenshot of the post page, click here

Changing the look of your blog
As a wordpress designer myself, one area I looked at first to see if it had improved was the design area (where you can select and edit your theme and settings).
The new design area is much easier to use. A big problem before was that when you were adding widgets to the sidebar you would have to scroll down, grab the widget then scroll back up to drop it onto the sidebar. Now the sidebar items are on the right of the page and the options for widgets are on the left, you simply click the Add link and it adds it to the sidebar and you can then rearrange the sidebar widgets easily. There is also no need to go down the page and add text widgets to widget selection area like in previous versions, all you have to do now is keep pressing the Add on the text widget. You can see a screenshot of the new widget page here

Conclusion
Although I have only touched up on a few things that the new wordpress has to offer, there is plenty more to see, the best thing to do is go ahead and install it and test drive it. It has only just been released in stable version so there may be a few problems, one that I found was that you couldn’t align uploaded images which is a problem but on the most part it all works fine. Good job wordpress team.

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