Wordpress 2.5 has been released just two days ago and I have updated all of my blogs with the new version. I think that we can agree on the fact that the update procedure itself worked flawlessly for almost everyone. This might have come as a surprise especially to those Wordpress admins who ran into troubles during the last updates.

The major change in this version of Wordpress is obviously the interface which was overhauled completely. The layout, colors and menus are different and it takes a while to get used to this new interface. I would compare it to updating from Windows XP to Windows Vista which in my opinion was nothing more than a graphical update.

I have spotted two new features that I like. The first is the new picture uploader which makes it possible to upload multiple pictures at once. It seems to be incompatible with several plugins though and I had to disable the Popularity plugin to get the uploader to work at all.

The second which is probably even more important is the ability to edit the permalink before it is being published. It is possible to have different titles and permalinks which was not possible before.

The list of features that I do not like is a little bit longer unfortunately. The new layout may look nice but it’s using a huge font size in my opinion. I was able to reduce the font in my browser permanently.
The biggest problem for me, layout wise, is the amount of white space. I use a resolution of 1280×1024 and about a fifth of the screen is unused which becomes even more when writing posts.

Some important menus however are in a position on the screen where they do not make sense at all. Talking about categories for instance. Why on earth do they have to be below the fold and in a tiny menu that one has to scroll a dozen times because it displays only six categories at once. Imagine a blog with 50+ categories.

While we are at it. Tags are implemented in a way that could be described as complicated. I have been using the Simple Tagging Plugin which had a feature that would auto-suggest tags that I have been using previously. This feature is gone, probably not the fault of the Wordpress developers, hopefully the plugin author will enable it again.

Comment Moderation has changed as well. I did moderate quite a few comments on one of my blogs that were already moderated. You get those handy delete or mark as spam buttons that affect all checked comments. I thought I was in a menu that was displaying only comments awaiting moderation but in reality I was in the menu that displayed all my comments.

I ended up deleting several legit comments on my blog. It’s kinda strange that a click on the number that is displaying over the Comments link does not lead directly to the comments awaiting moderation menu. It’s another click that leads to it from that main menu.

Wordpress is widget ready right ? Why don’t they make the admin pages widget ready as well ? It would be really cool if you could move the menus around, e.g. move the Categories menu back in the old place and make it display more entries at once. Wordpress should by default use the full screen width and not a standard 1024 width which it seems to be using for everything that is not in the header.