WordPress 2.5 – March 10

Word­press 2.5 comes out in less than two weeks! I read something about the “Media Uploa­der” on the deve­lop­ment blog, and, curious, I searched for more details, and came across this Word­Press 2.5 Beta demo site. The login name is admin and the pass­word is demo.

Aside from the stun­ning visual overhaul, there are seve­ral imme­dia­tely noti­cea­ble vast impro­ve­ments in some of the features:

• Cus­to­mi­za­ble thumb­nail (and medium) image sizes — this has been reques­ted fore­ver, and Word­Press finally lis­te­ned. Used to be that every image you uploa­ded was copied and resi­zed to a width of 128 pixels for auto­ma­ted thumb­nail crea­tion, which made a poten­tially cool fea­ture vir­tually use­less. Now they just need to intro­duce cropping.
• Bet­ter pri­vate post pro­tec­tion — kee­ping posts pri­vate is so unin­tui­tive in Word­Press 2.3. The post needs to be mar­ked as “Pri­vate” using a radio but­ton, but hit­ting the “Publish” but­ton ins­tead of the “Save” but­ton after edi­ting a pri­vate post stu­pidly dis­re­gards that pre­fe­rence. Now pri­vacy is indi­ca­ted by a check­box that flips pri­vacy on and off and keeps it that way.
• Tag mana­ge­ment — I guess we all knew this was coming. It seems like the deve­lo­pers were so eager to get tag sup­port out the door that with 2.2 or wha­te­ver it was they didn’t mind that you couldn’t edit any of the tags you create when you publish. Tag­ging a post just threw tags into the dark reces­ses of the Word­Press data­base, where they became inac­ces­si­ble except as part of a tag cloud on your site. But now we have an inter­face to delete, add, and edit them just as we do categories.

It’s pretty sweet. The media uploa­der is par­ti­cu­larly awe­some. I can’t wait to ins­tall it. The desig­ners still assume all their users can’t read fonts sma­ller than 16pt. I guess they’re trying to ensure they look Web 2.0 enough. And it looks like the Shuttle Pro­ject isn’t going anywhere after all.