I finally got around to updating all of my wordpress installations yesterday and wanted to echo something that Mitch Keeler mentioned on the Web Hosting Show, not a single thing broke during my upgrade, it was totally smooth! This upgrade is no small upgrade either, it’s a major upgrade in my opinion. The wordpress community took 6 months to put together this upgrade and I even heard rumors about some heavy hitters like Zeldman being brought in to offer usability advice.
My partner Greg and I were discussing yesterday how in the past the wordpress backend has always been a little intimidating to get around in for some of our non-technical clients. I think that this screenshot speaks volumes about the overall usability of the backend, or dashboard.
Here are some other improvements cited on the wordpress website:
Multi-file upload with progress bar — before when you would upload a large file you’d wait forever, never knowing how far along it was. And uploading more than one photo was an exercise in patience, as you could only do one at a time. Now you can select a whole of folder images or music or videos at once and it’ll show you the progress of each upload.
Bonus: EXIF extraction — if you upload JPEG files with EXIF metadata like camera make and model, aperture, shutter speed, ISO, et al. WordPress will extract all the data into custom fields you can use in your template. If you use the EXIF title fields or similar those will be put into their equivalent fields in WP. Most modern digital cameras generate EXIF data.
Search posts and pages — search used to cover just posts, now it includes pages too, a great boon for those using WordPress as a CMS. New themes can style or sort pages differently in results.
Tag management — you can now add, rename, delete, and do whatever else you like to tags from inside WordPress, no plugins needed.
Password strength meter — when you change your password on your profile it’ll tell you how strong your password is to help you pick a good one.
Concurrent editing protection — for those of you on multi-author blogs, have you ever opened a post while someone was already editing it, and your auto-saves kept overwriting each other, irrecoverably losing hours of work? I bet that added a few words to your vocabulary. Now if you open a post that someone else is editing, WordPress magically locks it and prevents you from saving until the other person is done. You’ll see a message like below.
If you run a wordpress website I recommend taking advantage of this upgrade!
Source: WordPress › Blog » WordPress 2.5
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