WordPress 2.5 is a welcomed improvement

WordPress version 2.5 was released just a week ago with a bit of grumble from the web community but overall I think that it’s a major improvement. This week I upgraded 15 blogs and installed 3 new ones and I must say that everything went without a hitch. I held my breath for quite a few minutes while upgrading one particular blog from version 2.0.2… but nothing broke and everything seems to be in working order.

I must say that the interface has come a long way. I really like the work that the Happy Cog folks and the WP community have created. My favourite component is the image uploading. Having the option to add different types of media and a window pop-up makes it much friendlier.

In the past I’ve used the flexible-upload plugin for re-sizing my images but this new version has made it no longer required.

The only glitch that came about was with the admin drop down menu plugin. If you were a fan of this plugin and upgraded to 2.5 you’ll notice that your navigation has completely disappeared. Just remove that plugin and everything will be back to normal.

If I were to complain about anything with this new version is the absence of post-id. These id numbers are very useful when building sites to be used as CMS. Let’s hope that they bring this back.

I also noticed that when you insert an email address, the tinyMCE interface no longer gives you the alert box telling you that it will convert your email address into the right HTML code. Instead it just sticks your email address into a url, which of course makes no sense. Maybe this is something that needs to be added, but I’ve never enjoyed fiddling with tinyMCE. Has anyone come across this and found a solution?