Habitually Good

Yesterday, I installed the latest WordPress release (release 2.5) and now that I have had a chance to play around with it, its time to quickly talk about the first impressions. And it’s all good.

Brand New Dashboard: Most of the visible changes in WordPress are around the administration side. Here is what the new Admin Dashboard looks like (click image to see a larger version).

As you can see, it is much nicer looking than its predecessor. This alone is a reason enough to upgrade. The navigation structure has changed a lot and so has the way the space is used on the dashboard.

It looks much crisper than before, and prettier. Notice that the most important functions are highlighted (Write Post and Write Page) on the top of the Dashboard. I personally use Windows LiveWriter so that really doesn’t matter a lot to me. But a lot of people do use the WordPress write page, and so this should be a nice change for them.

Write Post: Another nice change for the writers should be the nice interface for writing the post. As you can see in the image (click to see a larger version), there are separate icons to insert videos, photos, etc. Overall, the UI looks a little better than before (which really was an eyesore).

For some reason, the Categories selection box has been moved down, I kind of liked it in the Side Bar.

There is also a multiple file upload wit progress bar capability, although I haven’t tested it. I did test it for one file, and its very ajaxy.

Auto Plugin Upgrade – this is the best feature for someone who is lazy like me. What this does is that if there is an upgrade available for a plugin that you have installed, you can choose to click an upgrade button from the control panel itself and WordPress will download and install the upgrade for you:

Neat .

You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.