So whats the news on WordPress 2.5? I’m sure many wordpressers has gone over to wp.chrisjohnston.org and tested out the WordPress 2.5 Demo. For those who found it hard to log in due the site being heavily hacked by someone of espanic nature, don’t frett becuase I got it all right here. Let me jump in and get started.
The login… Looks allot like the WordPress.com setup don’t it? Nothing new there.
The next change, and the most predominant, are the colors and the “feel” of the backend. Look for yourself, not that bad. The dash offers easy buttons for instant posting. A few other blocks (not populated in this demo) are also in the dash, one by the likes of “Plugins”… possibly upcoming or released ones, or plugins you have already installed. RSS feeds for almost everything and all this in a well formed block layout.
In addition to the color changes, the layout of the navigation has been split up, the old position for the classics: Write, Manage, Design and Comments, then the more involved ones: Plugins, Users, Settings to the top right.
The “Write a Post” page on the WP2.5 demo is pretty neat. Everything is tabbed and pretty easy to find. Everything is moved into one column and the sidebar now only contains the “Publish Status” and “Publish” buttons.
The more interesting part of the “Write a Post” page is the addition of media types support buttons. The small circle shows that videos now have a dedicated button to embed with. WordPress was always sketchy in that regard, or at least that was my experience. The second is an add-media-and-other-forms-of-media menu. Not working properly in the demo, these I think will become an image, gallery, slide show and music buttons. Surely there to serve as an easy way to create complex posts inside the default framework. As some might know, managing galleries via WordPress takes some getting use to and allot of work if you want them to seamlessly integrate into your site. I have done so in the past here.
A very cool addition to WordPress as a CMS is the “Write a Link” page. I presume, seeing that I could not test this out a 100%, this is a way you can create a navigation link without creating a page and using some sort of 3rd party method to redirect it.
And thats about the just of it. Of coarse the rest of the pages has been formatted different in some ways, but not much. The bigger concern is the plugin compatibility and various other issues that people get when upgrading. Time will tell. But I can still wait some time before this upgrade, because it’s not mind blowing but only a small step forward.
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At least you gave a proper “description” of the changes.
Just a note, the “write a link” page is just the usual link (blog roll) manager, laid out similar to the “write a post” page. It has the following options:
- Category -> e.g.: “Blogroll”
- Target -> e.g.: “_blank”
- Visible -> Yes/No
- Link Raltionship-> XFN data
- Advanced options like link Image, RSS Address, etc…
If you like, I’ve got a zipped copy of WP2.5 for people to download if they want to try it out…
I can see the improvements on the UI from a usability front, but I’m really not feeling the design aspects. I’ve found some WP-user created admin back-ends that look a lot better.
Meh, maybe it’s just me.
@James: What! My bad. Thats sucks then. So elaborate for just adding a link to the blogroll. I’m still dying to sea a better plugin manager. There is a huge gap in the system. Gonna do some digging for a plugin.
@Honestape: Any of them you are using actively? Please share some links with us. I’m personally never to keen to fuck with a backend.
“Writing a Link” is a simple way to add a link to your blogroll, or “Links” area. So, it could be used for navigaton, but it’s obviously not ideal.
Interesting! Can’t wait to have it in my hands
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Very useful review here, dude.