Wordpress 2.5

There doesn’t seem to be long before the next major release of Wordpress — version 2.5. Originally planned for release on the 10th of March, it seems that Wordpress 2.5 is not far away. Looks like I might have an interesting couple of weeks (if I choose to ignore revision, which is bound to happen;) with the possible releases of Ubuntu Hardy Heron and Wordpress 2.5. For whatever reason the developers decided to ignore 2.4, I guess this was intended to make the release seem more important.

Wordpress 2.5 does feature major changes in the Dashboard and ‘Write’ pages, but nothing there really interests me. It will probably be easier to navigate, but I don’t find the current solution to be cumbersome. Here are the major changes:

• Faster load times.
• Multi-file uploads.
• Customisable Dashboard
• New “Media Manager” for images, audio, video, etc.
• Built-in gallery function.
• Built-in (and pluggable) Gravatars support.
• One-click auto-update for plug-ins.
• Reactivate plugins after a ‘Deactivate All Plug-ins’ action.
• Tag management

Notice the one in bold? (I really hope you did, otherwise you might want to see an optician.) Yep, a built-in gallery! Now I don’t need to bother with setting up Gallery2, or any other Gallery plugin. Wordpress will have the function straight out of the box, except it doesn’t come in a box… So when the stable version of 2.5 is released, and Dreamhost get round to supporting it, I’ll happily move over for the gallery alone. The other features all sound nice (who doesn’t like faster load times?) but nothing else really sounds groundbreaking. I wonder how the many Gallery plug-ins will react, will we see some improvements being made to them, to warrant their installation? Or will they just die out (well, the Wordpress forks.)

Upgrading Wordpress… expect downtime!

Sorry for the lack of news today

Hello world!