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.