Taking A Look At WordPress 2.5

With the latest WordPress upgrade just around the corner will you be upgrading to the new look WordPress 2.5?

I have a few blogs, including BBI, that run on Wordpress and there are few areas of this CMS that could do with improvement. Multiple file uploads, gallery creation, better post & draft management are top of my list. I know some of these can be sorted out by using plugins, it’s just that I’d prefer them to be elements of the core software.

After having a quick read at some of the Sneak Peek notes on what seems a totally revamped UI and a few new features such as a customizable dashboard, multi-file upload, built-in galleries, one-click plugin upgrades, tag management, built-in Gravatars, full text feeds, and faster load times it definitely sounds like I will be taking it for a test drive on a lesser trafficed blog and finding out what works and what doesn’t.

As with all software upgrades certain add-ons don’t work and I’m sure WP 2.5 will be no different. I’m sure there will be a few plugins that fail and a couple of templates that go wrong. This however could be simply down to these being poorly coded to begin with.

The image below shows the Manage screens page and this feature is probably the main reason I’m going to try this out. From what I can see and what I’m hoping for is that the draft posts will be listed in some kind of easy to read and sensible order, instead of the messy way they are listed currently. I always have at least 50 draft posts and looking at the current layout drives me nuts.

For that one feature alone I’ll be upgrading - of course that also depends on how certain templates and plugins look and work. From what I can gather the full release is due anytime within the next day or two and remember to back up everything if you are upgrading incase it all goes horribly wrong.