The date is almost upon us; WordPress 2.5 (remember, 2.4 was skipped) is almost ready to make its official debut come March 10, 2008. The release date has been pushed back, but it should be released by the end of March, 2008.

Right now, it’s still quite rough and is currently undergoing some final rounds of testing and tweaking; but it’s solidified enough to give you a quick overview of some of the feature changes and additions, along with how they compare to the WordPress 2.3.x branch. Prepare yourself for a change.

WordPress Dashboard

The dashboard is like the hub of the blog — the first thing you see once you log in — and you’ll definitely notice some significant changes right away. The most obvious will be the design and color scheme which has moved from cool blues to icy blue, dark grey, and burnt orange.


(WP 2.3.x dashboard.)


(WP 2.5.x dashboard.)

One other change you may notice off the bat is how the content now lays out. Rather than having your content on the left with quick blog statistics in the right hand column, you now have a single column featuring quick links to the write screens, followed by blog stats, recent comments, incoming links, and aggregated feeds from the WP dev blog and WP planet.

What you may not notice right away, however, is the fact that the feeds are now customizable. If you don’t want to see the WP dev blog or WP planet feeds, it’s quite simple to change it to the feeds you do want to see at a glance. You’ll also be able to customize your incoming links display; don’t like Google blog search? Change it back to Technorati.

WordPress Navigation Menu

If you’ve grown accustomed to the straight forward menu of items in WordPress 2.3.x, you’ll definitely need to get used to the reduced menu that’s being sported in the newest version; plus a few menu items have been completely renamed.


(WP 2.3.x navigation menu.)


(WP 2.5.x navigation menu.)

Write, Manage, Design, and Comments could be found in the usual spot, but the Plugins, Users, and Settings are now in the mid-upper right corner.

Did you catch the name changes, by the way? Presentation has become Design, Options has become Settings, and Blogroll has disappeared altogether.

Actually, Blogroll hasn’t really disappeared, it’s just been renamed to Links and can be found under Manage. You will also find a Link navigation item under Write where you’ll be able to add links to your blogroll.

Writing a Post and Page

Cardiac patients should probably prepare themselves for the completely overhauled write pages. Items are no longer where you’d expect them to be and if you’re a power blogger prone to using many of the advanced WordPress features such as tags, categories, and trackbacks, prepare to do quite a bit of scrolling.


(WP 2.3.x write page.)


(WP 2.5.x write page.)

You also won’t be able to drag and drop items in the order you’d prefer to have them as you could do with the 2.3.x branch, but there is one feature you might find cool — the media manager.

At the time of this writing, it appears to only support uploading from your computer, but a previous iteration gave a glimpse into the future; there was an option to add media from services such as Flickr and YouTube.

Managing Your Posts/Pages

The Manage page didn’t escape the sweeping hands of change either. If you’re used to manually deleting posts one at a time or clicking on the Edit link next to a particular entry, you’ll have to get used to the new way of doing things.


(WP 2.3.x manage posts page.)


(WP 2.5.x manage posts page.)

The ultra-observant reader will probably notice the change in date format — WP 2.5.x is now sporting a user friendly "4 hours ago" as opposed to an actual date, but it will change to a date format after a 24 hour period. Plus, you’ll be able to see the posts’ tags and publication status.

If you’re wondering how one would edit the post if the actual edit link has disappeared, just click on the post title and you’re golden.

Only want to see posts with a particular tag listed on the manage page? Click on the tag and WP will list all those posts for you; same with clicking on the author or a category.

As an added bonus, rather than needing to delete posts one at a time, you can now mass delete entries. This is good if you want to delete all the posts within a particular category or with a particular tag — just filter the display accordingly, click the topmost checkbox and hit the delete button.

Twists In the Edit Post Page

More significant changes will become aware whenever you need to edit a particular blog entry.

Notably, you’re greeted with a large "View this Post" button which replaces the "preview" link that was hidden between the title and post content. You’re also able to quickly edit the post slug on the fly — this can be helpful or hurtful depending on how often bloggers decide to change this after publication.

It would be more prudent to have the slug box further up on the page so bloggers can address the permalinks the first time around (possibly just under the title) so there’s really no need to change the slug in the first place.

Finally, there’s a quick delete link which removes the need for bloggers to scroll all the way to the bottom of the page just to delete an entry and there is an option to view the comments associated with the post, all comments, or all posts.

Basic Tag Management

Glancing at the sub-menu links under Manage, you’ll see a brand new one called Tags. From there, you can do some basic tag management such as adding, editing, or deleting your individual tags. Don’t worry though, getting used to this page won’t be difficult because it mimics the category management page almost exactly.

The tag manager may not be as robust as many are hoping for, but it’s a start and there are still future versions to come.

Manage Your Media

The other new link appearing under the Manage tab is called Media Library, which replaces Upload, and it’s where you can find and manage each of your uploaded files. Again, however, the name is probably giving you a glimpse into the future as WordPress begins supporting a multitude of file formats, such as video and audio, out of the box.

Widgets Users May Gasp

Theme widget lovers everywhere will probably let out a collective sigh of distress after visiting the new widget page (under Design, previously Presentation).


(WP 2.3.x widget management.)


(WP 2.5.x widget management.)

The redesign by itself is not the cause for alarm, but the removal of drag and drop support may be. Instead of clicking and dragging a specific widget onto the sidebar (which first needs to be selected from the drop down menu), you need to click on an Add link next to it.

Once it’s already on the sidebar, then you’re free to click and drag however you want them to be arranged. There is good news, though. Each widget now comes with a short description explaining what the widget does and a widget filter and search function (in case you lose track).

Comment Cuteness

Tired of clicking on the comments menu only to discover you don’t actually have any comments awaiting moderation? Now, you won’t need to because WordPress will show you exactly how many comments you have waiting for review right in the navigation menu.

User Account Management

On the surface, it may not look like much has changed in the user management, but it has. First, the user filters have been improved a bit — clicking on a specific role’s link will only display users with that particular role.

At the time of this writing, however, changing the roles for a mass number of users has become more difficult (I’m confident this will change before the official release) while deleting a mass number of users has become much easier.


(WP 2.3.x user management.)


(WP 2.5.x user management.)

Avatars Out of the Box

Easily overlooked if you’re not specifically looking for it, but WordPress 2.5.x will support avatars straight out of the box (and by "avatars", I really mean Gravatars — this may change in the future to allow for user uploaded avatars). For those of you who could care less or specifically don’t want avatars used on your blog, you’re in luck because it can be disabled.

This nifty new option can be found under the Settings -> Reading link.

Final Thoughts

This version heralds small, yet significant changes to WordPress and how people, especially seasoned users, will manage their websites. I’m reserving my absolute final thoughts until WordPress 2.5.x is ready for mass distribution. My initial thoughts are mixed. WordPress is certainly moving in a good direction, but some of the changes do seem to be going backwards.

The areas I specifically think are moving backwards are the write pages and widgets options. Although the current write page is quite wide, and the new write page does address this, the option panels on the right side were certainly helpful for the power blogger.

Now, a blogger will need to scroll down in order to address certain settings and it can become tedious for multiple blog entries. Also, those options are no longer configurable, so the blogger cannot rearrange the layout to suit their own personal blogging needs.

Widgets used to be straight forward with the drag and drop — click on a widget and put it in the sidebar you want. With this new system, the blogger must first select the sidebar to customize from the drop down menu, then click on the Add button to put the widget in play, and then drag and drop the widget wherever it should be displayed on the sidebar.

It makes it more difficult to play around with multiple sidebar configurations on the fly. Of course, one plus to the new widget system is definitely the edit options — no more strange pop up menus which don’t properly work in IE to begin with.

There are other areas which can bring up confusion for the end user, especially inexperienced ones, but one can only hope they’ll all be addressed in future releases.

For the most part, most people will either love it or hate it. In fact, some people may feel so strongly that they’ll rail against upgrading until some other significant changes are made altogether.

This may be the boding of another 2.0.x and 2.1.x fiasco where diehard fans of the 2.0.x branch stuck to their guns while others adopted the 2.1.x changes with relative ease. It only makes me wonder whether the WordPress team will continue to support the 2.3.x branch to a certain date until more people are willing to accept the 2.5.x changes.

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