Matt has created a screencast that presents some of the new and cool features of WordPress 2.5. The screencast fills a gap that has existed until now with regards to people writing and talking about the new version using only screenshots and descriptions. Seeing the system live really brings home how WordPress 2.5 signals a pretty new approach to WordPress blogging in so many ways.
Here are some of the points that I found most interesting:
- The dashboard is fully editable. I mean fully. Fabulous.
- One little click and the text editor becomes full screen. Usability heaven.
- The interface has all sorts of Ajaxy stuff, which seems to make uploading and interacting with dialogue boxes a lot smoother…and prettier.
- A built-in photo gallery which looks great. This gallery allows you to add groups of photos right from the text editor and create albums and galleries. You can see examples on Matt’s blog
- The new tagging interface is way more user friendly, with the ability to easily add and remove tags, and my favorite new feature: auto-suggest. This ensures that you don’t end up with duplicate tags within your blog, like “blog,” “Blog,” and “Blogs” by suggesting existing tags to you as you type. This is really great because it means I can knock one more plugin off of my “always use” plugin list – this time it’s Simple Tags, which is a great plugin, but I’m always happy to use less plugins.
- Matt had five wisdom teeth pulled, and he sounds like it. Poor Matt. I know how that feels, and all I can say is that I hope you have a really speedy recovery, and “Refuah Sheleimah” (right Raanan?).
Matt also points out that the community has started a list of which plugins work with WordPress 2.5, and which don’t, and from what I can see most of the plugins I use on a regular basis are compatible. Phew.
Here’s the screencast, but I suggest you visit Matt’s original post on this subject at the WP developer’s blog since the quality is much better there:
