I’ve decided to take the plunge and upgrade my web design WordPress blog to 2.5 - I figured I’d better do this before one of my clients asks me to upgrade their blog Go here to read about the new features it’s got. If you’re a client of mine and you want to see what the new admin area looks like before you upgrade, you can take a look at some of the videos in the link above, or take a look inside my demo blog.

Besides wanting to stay ahead of my clients, here are some of the features of the new WordPress 2.5 that caught my eye:

• Search now searches posts AND pages (before it only searched pages and therefore I had to install a plugin to search posts)
• Easy to upgrade plugins: WordPress 2.5 has this feature that tells you if a plugin is outdated (this part is not new) but then it will automatically install it for you - wow, very, very cool.
• New “Add Media” feature: There’s a neat looking “Add media” row of icons for adding images, video, and audio - I used it to add the WordPress logo above, wow, it’s sweet, much, much improved.
• The Permalink is right there in front of you: Rather being called “slug”, which I never understood, now the “permalink” is right there under your title and easy to remember to edit.
• The fighting between the visual editor and the html editor is allegedly over. If you’ve ever tried to add your own HTML and had it mysteriously and frustratingly disappear, WordPress 2.5 is for you. I can now go back to using the Visual editor
• It sports a new gallery feature that I haven’t tried out yet, but is supposed to be fabulous.

So far, so good, and I’m impressed. I only had one of my plugins (Popularity Contest) fail to activate and I found a fix here - all my other plugins upgraded just fine.  I’ll keep adding to the list as I find new bells and whistles.

The only problem is that I’ll have to update many of my blog tutorial videos, but it’s a small price to pay for blogging progress

Go WordPress 2.5 Go!

(Note: The time it takes to upgrade your blog to 2.5 depends on your initial installation. Some hosting companies like DreamHost, have nice one-click installation and one-click upgrade features that make it fast.)

This entry was posted on Saturday, April 19th, 2008 at 2:59 pm and is filed under the Blogs category. Read other Aldebaran Website Design Blog articles by returning to main blog page. Need a blog added to your website? Click here to read about blog installation services or click here to contact Aldebaran Web Design.