Filed under: Design, Internet, Blogging, Open Source
WordPress 2.5 released, and all eyes turn to 2.6
If you're the more astute blogging type, it probably came to your attention a week or two ago that WordPress 2.5 was released. Depending on what kind of web space maintenance type person you are, you may or may not have upgraded immediately.Today's big admission at Download Squad is that some of us, ahem, ignored the Upgrade Now! link for the last two weeks. It wasn't that we didn't care. It wasn't that we didn't think it was important. We usually love the opportunity to click on new buttons and thingamahoosies and
Pfft. Yeah. Probably.
But hot on the heels of the 2.5 release comes lots of talk and flurry about WP 2.6. It's something that would strike a lot of users as odd. Sure, developers have roadmaps, and plans, and direction for future releases well before current releases are completely polished. It usually takes a little more than two weeks for those sorts of things to be laid out on the table.
It would strike people as odd if they hadn't already laid their eyes upon the radically different 2.5 dashboard.
Love it or hate it, the new dashboard is here to stay.
There seems to be very little middle ground with the new dashboard. It garners a strong reaction. Personally, most of us here think it's a little awkward and the default colors are pretty gross. Fortunately, there are a few themes for the dashboard that won't make your eyes burn, and we expect the numbers will grow. If you're feeling less adventurous, it is easy (though not terribly intuitive) to go into your user profile and change the color scheme to something less "fresh".
Certainly the most awkward feature of the new layout is the fact that tagging and categorizing posts requires the writer to scroll down the page. Huh? Why can't the categories, at least, remain on the side panel?
But the features of 2.5, in our book, make up for the extra effort spent scrolling and the assault on our retinas. Media galleries. Need we say more? Multi-photo uploading. And of course, by media, we actually mean... media. As in video, and audio, and still pictures. The responsiveness on the admin end is a bit sluggish with media manipulation and delivery. This could be a huge deal if your site relies on this sort of thing every day. We imagine, though, it's also one of those things that will most likely be addressed in 2.5.1, if not by 2.6.
WordPress is hot, and promising faster release cycles, more features, and increased ease of use (can you say: blogging from anywhere?). Having used just about every piece of blogging software under the sun for varying lengths of time, we can attest that WordPress is one of our favorites. Even if it takes us a long time to get motivated to upgrade.
You know, even if the dashboard is wearing all its favorite colors.
[Via WPCandy and a special thanks to Rob for kicking us into upgrade mode!]
There seems to be very little middle ground with the new dashboard. It garners a strong reaction. Personally, most of us here think it's a little awkward and the default colors are pretty gross. Fortunately, there are a few themes for the dashboard that won't make your eyes burn, and we expect the numbers will grow. If you're feeling less adventurous, it is easy (though not terribly intuitive) to go into your user profile and change the color scheme to something less "fresh".
Certainly the most awkward feature of the new layout is the fact that tagging and categorizing posts requires the writer to scroll down the page. Huh? Why can't the categories, at least, remain on the side panel?
But the features of 2.5, in our book, make up for the extra effort spent scrolling and the assault on our retinas. Media galleries. Need we say more? Multi-photo uploading. And of course, by media, we actually mean... media. As in video, and audio, and still pictures. The responsiveness on the admin end is a bit sluggish with media manipulation and delivery. This could be a huge deal if your site relies on this sort of thing every day. We imagine, though, it's also one of those things that will most likely be addressed in 2.5.1, if not by 2.6.
WordPress is hot, and promising faster release cycles, more features, and increased ease of use (can you say: blogging from anywhere?). Having used just about every piece of blogging software under the sun for varying lengths of time, we can attest that WordPress is one of our favorites. Even if it takes us a long time to get motivated to upgrade.
You know, even if the dashboard is wearing all its favorite colors.
[Via WPCandy and a special thanks to Rob for kicking us into upgrade mode!]
Reader Comments (Page 1 of 1)
Roy said 11:49AM on 4-08-2008
I don't get what this has to do with Wordpress 2.6
Reply
Kristin Shoemaker said 12:38PM on 4-08-2008
Check the links... The WPCandy link features Matt at WP discussing the trek forward from here to WP 2.6. It's a medium length (seven minute) video clip, and it's quite apparent someone in the audience needs a lozenge badly, but it does give a run down on release cycles and upcoming features.
alienvenom said 11:53AM on 4-08-2008
I recently upgraded my weblog to WordPress 2.5, and I was somewhat disappointed to find that not one of my plugins (for captcha, etc...) didn't work. Sure this might be an issue with the plugin's developer, but I wish there was a way it would check ahead of time to inform me of compatibility issues.
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kingkool68 said 2:02PM on 4-08-2008
The media uploader has been giving me trouble. From one machine pictures just won't upload for whatever reason. On another computer the jazzy lightbox window doesn't load. Can we get an option for a simple upload field?
Happy Cog, the design team behind the re architecture of the admin area, did a great job of reducing the clutter and putting everything in a logical place. I'm happy running 2.5.
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tank said 4:51PM on 4-08-2008
I'm not upgradeing yet till all 8 of my plugin's are wp2.5 compadibatle.
As for the new image/gallery function, cool yes, but not all that useful as I've found using external gallery's like gallery2 or flicker are wayyy more stable and easy to upkeep when you don't need to depend on the backbone of your blog cms. Too many things can go wrong when you have a blog and image gallery combined into one.
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Matthew Hill said 10:09AM on 4-11-2008
Lots of nice new features in 2.5 as you say, but the core, the Write screen, is now broken in my opinion. It’s painful to use and actually worse than the previous version. I believe it was a mistake to move so much stuff from the sidebar; what was previously a streamlined workflow is now disjointed.
The new widgets screen has usability problems too. No drag and drop to and from the sidebars anymore. What took a couple of actions previously now takes up to 11 clicks, though I guess they were trying to make the software more accessible to non-javascript users.
The very respected agency Happy Cog did the IA work on this, and they are experts on user interface design and usability, so I’m a bit bemused about these newly introduced usability problems.
I’ve been trying to get some feedback on the changes, but so far no luck:
http://www.friskdesign.com/blog/2008/04/11/wordpress-gets-it-wrong/">
I’m staying away from 2.5 and will wait to see what happens with the incremental updates.
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