So finally, and with a day to spare before the end of the month the much hyped and long awaited wordpress 2.5 is officially available for download as a “stable” release and it’s looking like it’s packed with alot more value than expected. I’m going through the motions right now of backing up, and getting ready to take that brave upgrade step.
If you visit the wordpress.org website you’ll notice a slight brand refresh and you can feel the distinct touch the Happy Cog guys have added to the interface as well as in the admin panel where the user interface has seen a significant upgrade.
The development team have been hard at work putting all their efforts into creating a much more user friendly and feature packed product which I’m sure will make lots of wordpress enthusiasts and newbies alike very happy. Something I’m looking forward to testing out, especially with some recent problems experienced on a client site is the a WYSIWYG that doesn’t mess with your code. Here’s what the release page has to say:
WordPress 2.5, the culmination of six months of work by the WordPress community, people just like you. The improvements in 2.5 are numerous, and almost entirely a result of your feedback: multi-file uploading, one-click plugin upgrades, built-in galleries, customizable dashboard, salted passwords and cookie encryption, media library, a WYSIWYG that doesn’t mess with your code, concurrent post editing protection, full-screen writing, and search that covers posts and pages.
I’ve just upgraded and am already impressed by some of the features, especially so the automatic upgrade of plugins which I’ve taken full advantage of. Make sure you follow every step of the upgrade process in order and you do full backups of your db and site files. Good luck to all upgraders.