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Well, WordPress 2.5 has been released for about a week now, and I’ve been able to grace Webmacster87.info with its presence after spending some time last night doing an update. I’ve had some opportunities to play around with the new admin interface and some of the other changes, and since this is such a significant update to WordPress, what better time to do a review of the update? So, I’m going to take the time now to discuss some of the things that I like about the update, some of the things that I don’t like, as well as talking about some of the things that I’ve done to Webmacster87.info during last night’s update.

The main attraction to WordPress 2.5 is a “brand new” administration interface. Now, don’t get me wrong, WordPress has one of the best CMS admin interfaces in my opinion, but there have been some quirky things present in the past, so I was eager to find out how 2.5 would improve on the experience.

Beyond the brand new color scheme (which took about half an hour until I became used to it), not much has changed. There’s a grey bar up on top which just contains a link to the Dashboard, along with the “Howdy” message and links to logout, get help, or go to the forums. Personally, I don’t seem to get the point of this grey bar on top compared to how it was laid out previously, but oh well.

The navigation really hasn’t changed much. The original navigation just listed Dashboard, Write, Manage, Comments, Blogroll, Presentation, Plugins, Users, and Options going down the line. Well, now the top navigation has been divided into two major sections. Other than the Dashboard being moved up top, the “main” navigation now has Write, Manage, Design, and Comments. On the right side, Settings, Plugins, and Users are listed in somewhat smaller text. Aside from slightly reordering the navigation, this is pretty much the same, with the exception of Presentation being renamed Design and the Blogroll disappearing. (WordPress has finally restored the way it was back in WP 2.0 and before by renaming Blogroll to Links again–these are now found under the Write and Manage sections).

The subnavigation has hardly changed. The settings are pretty much the same, with the exception of settings for Gravatars, which are now built-into WordPress. There’s also some expanded settings for the new uploading features.

The Manage section has been expanded, though. WordPress now lets you manage all those tags that you have created over time (I presently have over 800 tags here on Webmacster87.info!), the same way that you can manage categories. This means that you can delete tags or modify the name of the tags, and the changes will be made to all of the posts you have using that tag. Link Categories have once again separated from Post Categories (reflecting the way WordPress 2.0 and earlier worked, and making me very happy), plus you can now manage your Media Library as well (see below).

The Dashboard has now been retooled to be more user-friendly, and in some ways it is, although it’s not been improved as much as I would like. The Dashboard starts out with a very prominent Right Now section which includes quick links to write a new page or a new post, and says how many posts, pages, drafts, categories, tags, and anything else that you have. It even tells you what theme you’re using currently, how many widgets you have active in your sidebar(s), and what WordPress version you’re currently using. If you have Akismet, it will tell you all about your spam comments (if you haven’t noticed, Webmacster87.info will be crossing 30,000 spam comments caught very soon…). The next boxes on the Dashboard show you recent comments and incoming links–this time, these are more positioned more central to the page than they were before. If you’re using the WordPress.com Stats service version 1.2 or later (which I highly recommend), a small teaser of your site stats will show in the next box (of course, the full Blog Stats page is still available in the navigation). Next is the WordPress Development Blog and a box that shows you some of the latest from the WordPress Plugins Directory, and then the bottom shows the WordPress Planet news.

Now, this Dashboard is advertised to be customizable, but it’s not as customizable as I would like. All of the boxes on the Dashboard are there and are stationary–you can’t move them around. What is different is that the Incoming Links, Plugins, Development Blog, and Planet boxes are all actually RSS feeds, and there’s an Edit button there which allows you to put in a different RSS feed, in case you would rather track something other than what’s there. However, even though the Dashboard has technically been “widgetized,” making each aspect of the Dashboard independent, WordPress doesn’t offer a built-in way to customize it any further. You’ll need a plugin like Viper007Bond’s Dashboard Widget Manager to be able to customize your Dashboard beyond the RSS feeds.

The new Write screen has been completely retooled, but mostly because a couple of things have been moved around. The slide up/slide down settings on the right side of the Write screen aren’t gone, they’ve just been moved down below the post. The Preview/Save/Publish buttons have been moved to the right side of the page in their place. However, a few things have been made a bit more prominent–along with the Save and Publish buttons, the Post Status (Unpublished/Published/Pending Review), the ability to keep this post private, and my personal favorite feature to alter the timestamp of a post has been made much more prominent. While I do think that moving most of those right-side things downstairs is good, I do wish that Categories could be made a little more prominent–the new placement of Categories causes me to be more forgetful in terms of setting categories. However, WordPress does have an improved section for entering tags and managing them once you’ve entered them which is pretty cool, including that it recommends suggestions based on past tags that you’ve entered, which is nice so that you don’t come up with corny duplicates (such as “blog” versus “blogs”). There is one bug on the screen, in that when it saves drafts, it shows the UTC time, instead of the localized time zone that has been set in the Settings screen. But overall, I do think that the Write screen has been improved.

Something that I found kind of interesting was that the Widgets screen has been completely redone with a new interface. The interface is much more reminiscent of Sidebar Modules (something that I never liked, but a lot of people prefer), although with more animation. However, it took me quite a bit of time to get used to the new layout, and I personally kind of thought that the original was better. What’s particularly annoying about this new layout is that it only supports one sidebar at a time, which gets quite annoying. If you switch from one sidebar to the other without saving your changes to the first sidebar first, you lose everything that you have done. And as for trying to move widgets from one sidebar to another, what once took a few seconds to do took me five minutes to do last night–absolutely crazy. I would be more willing to accept this new layout if it had multi-sidebar support, but that really ticked me off here.

One thing that I really liked was that WordPress now has built-in support for Gravatars, which Automattic recently acquired and now runs. (I’ve been supporting Gravatars here on Webmacster87.info via a separate plugin for awhile now, but using the built-in function seems to go a little bit faster.) However, for existing themes that haven’t been updated for 2.5 to have Gravatars built in, you’ll need to add in the function yourself, and there’s a Gravatars Codex article that describes how to do that.

WordPress now has made managing uploads and other media much nicer. From the posting page, you can choose to upload an image, video, audio, or any other type of file by clicking on the appropriate link. From there, you can upload your files or else link to them in an existing URL. WordPress lets you administrate them and keep track of them through a Media Library section under Manage. Apparently, some of the nice features are that you can add multiple uploads at once, see their progress, and even post entire galleries in one post. I haven’t had a chance to try this yet (though I hope to soon), but you can see this demoed in a screencast video done by Matt Mullenweg, and see an actual gallery he posted.

WordPress 2.5 is definitely a significant upgrade, but it’s not significant enough to be considered a WordPress 3.0. There continue to be a couple of cheesy aspects of WordPress that hopefully will get revised in future versions (actually, a number of the cheesy spots have been pointed out within the software itself as being cheesy and in need of revisions), and some parts of the new interface aren’t as “new” as I would like them to have been. Don’t let the new color scheme fool you: this is still WordPress. However, great changes have to start somewhere, and as we wait for the inevitable 2.5.1 and to hear the developers talk about what to expect in 2.6, I can say that WordPress 2.5 is a worthy upgrade that is worth the six months that it has spent in the oven.

Final Rating:

Tags: 2.5, administration, Dashboard, features, interface, review, update, widgets, WordPress