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.