You know, sometimes it’s something little that makes your day. I sit and read my feeds and see something that’s either really sweet, or slap-knee funny, and just puts you in a good mood. Here are a couple examples of such that I ran across today:
Tip those tiaras, ladies! Another new member joins the ranks today: Nice Deb. I’ve been reading over her blog the last couple of days and am really impressed. I’m told she also co-blogs over at Ace of Spades as well. I think she makes a fine addition to our ‘roll and hope that some of you will get a chance to mosey by her blog and take a peak!
I updated all of my blogs to WordPress 2.5 last night. I have some mixed feelings about the upgrade. The upgrade process itself went more easily than I had anticipated, and even though I still need to update my theme with new “features” (avatars, etc.), it’s not bad.
I’m still getting used to the new WP Admin layout, while it loads MUCH faster than the previous layout, I’m a little displeased with a few changes they made. For starters, in the write post pages, the categories listing has been moved down towards the bottom of the page. While, it’s not a huge deal, as I have to scroll down anyways to edit my tags, it’s still an annoyance. I personally enjoyed having them sitting right beside my composition box.
I have noticed that the tags, excerpt, etc. boxes aren’t ajax’d, so I can’t rearrange them. It isn’t big deal, but I’m particular about my setups and preferences.
I know … big shocker there.
Something else I’m seriously missing is the “Save and continue” button. One of the developers mentioned that it was unnecessary considering WordPress now auto-saves .. but honestly, I would find myself using that button often — especially after any large additions to a post, or during storms (when a power outage is feared the most!) — times like those I do not like sitting and waiting around for WordPress to save. It would be nice to adjust the auto-save timing.
I want to speed mine up!
Much ado about widgets
They’ve also overhauled the widgets admin layout as well. It took me a bit to figure out where was what. I really like that text widgets now display the title (if set), so you can tell which ones are which. (That was WAY overdue, IMO) But one complaint I have there is that if you have more than one sidebar, you cannot edit them at the same time. You are forced to switch back and forth between them. Also, the way you add text, rss, etc. widgets has also changed from a drop-down menu to a text link — you cannot add them in bulk anymore, and must add one at a time.
Most users will not miss that feature, but it sure makes things easier for those of us widgetizing old themes!
Visually appealing
I’ve read that the visual editor has improved, but I have not yet tried it myself. If it works as well as everything I’ve been reading, I may just switch to it from the old text editor. We’ll see how that goes…
Plug it in, plug it in
I haven’t had any problems with plugins yet. WordPress now has the ability to automatically update your plugins for you. It downloads the updated version, removes the older version in your plugins directory, copies over the new files, and if it was already activated, it will attempt to reactivate it. This is a great feature for those who are not very tech savvy and often need help updating plugins.
However, those like me who fiddle with plugin code, this is no help. I have a handful of plugins that I have modified to fit my theme and/or fix things, and will still need to download the updated versions to compare line by line and make the needed changes accordingly.
Overall
All in all, I guess I can’t complain too much. It does seem to load faster, and I think overall that these were great improvements for WordPress.
I just finished updating Jim’s site to WordPress 2.5. He comes over to say thanks and leans down to kiss me … then quickly turns his had and says, “Syke!” and laughs.
I grabbed his shirt and said, “Don’t test me, I can put that shit back!”
He laughs then gives me a quick kiss, a “That’s my girl!” and a couple chocolate mint cookies.
