WordPress 2.5 - A review

By jimdiggitydog

One word: Sweet!

Another word: Do your homework!

(Yeah, that’s 3 words. Sue me.)

WordPress 2.5 was released a few days ago, and I’ve taken the plunge on a couple of sites. AllAboutFreelance.com is one of them, and my main business site is another. It all went smoothly - with a minor exception.

The Pros:

Much Sexier:
It’s a lot better looking! I’ve grown reasonably accustomed to the old style, so this one will take a wee bit of getting used to - but on first blush, it’s a great improvement. I think it’ll be even more important and more attractive for my end clients. Much more Web 2.0, and a vast improvement in professionalism.

More Organized:
That’s never a bad thing! Some of the tabs are a little more obvious as to their use. No more “blogroll.”

Easier Media:
Supports YouTube embeds directly in posts without any help. Also has multiple file uploads simultaneously - which is great! Makes gallery-making a lot easier. Add music and other media directly - and all with a nice interface. Pretty slick!

Search Pages and Posts:
HELL YEAH! Great for those of us that use WordPress as a CMS for clients. Nice!

Built-in Galleries:
Pretty slick stuff. Not as good as the NextGen gallery plug-in, but pretty sweet. *see note below about 2.5 and NextGen.

Seems Faster:
Could just be me, but it seems zippier - especially in the back end.

A bunch of other stuff - I’d rate this a 7.5 out of 10 as far as updates. Really nice.

The Cons:

It’s Different:
It’s different, and sometimes change can be a bad thing. I don’t really think so, but some hard-core WPers might not dig it all.

It Broke My Business Site:
But that’s really my fault. NextGen Gallery, which I use for my portfolio, needed to be updated. It stopped working on the pages, since it turns out that the calls for the NextGen pages were the same as the calls for the new built-in gallery pages. So, my pages were trying to call galleries that weren’t there.

So - really, the cons are very minimal. I would strongly advise that any plugins that you rely on - CHECK THEM FOR COMPATIBILITY FIRST.

Other than that - I say upgrade. And happy blogging!