My first thoughts on WordPress 2.5

You can’t tell from looking at it, but this blog is running the latest and greatest version of WordPress.  As a matter of fact, SpunPuppy has run a testing version of WordPress since it went live.  It was only today I remembered that I hadn’t updated the test code for a while, so I ran the update and…  WOW!

I’m completely impressed with the new Admin Panel, though there are some areas that need cleaning up, even according to Ryan Boren.  2.5 is in feature freeze now, which means that the team is simply squashing bugs along the way.

One change I’ve long wanted to see still hasn’t made it into this release, and that would be the ability to mark a link as “nofollow”, or even to manually enter the “rel=” value directly from the Visual Editor.  I suppose since I seem to be the only person who really wants this feature I should get in there and write the code myself.  (And I think I will!)

The visual editor has historically had a slew of issues related to compatibility and standards compliance, but I’m hoping to see at least some of these fixed in this release, and so far I’m not disappointed.  The Image upload dialog now requires the use of the “alt” tag and title tag for images, which is a huge step in the right direction, tough in this particular release, it is not actually adding images to my posts in the Visual editor.  There seems to be a javascript issue happening at the moment, but these errors are to be expected at this stage of the game.

I’m also missing any image browser in the Write page, but again, I assume they just haven’t gotten around to getting that on the page yet. (At least that’s what I’m hoping)

For now, I’m going to play around with some of the features and get a better idea of where the usability changes are.  But so far, i’m seriously impressed.

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