WordPress 2.5 Released

Some background information first.

My regard for WordPress has been growing steadily over the last two years since I started using it as my blogging software of choice. And I’ve integrated it for quite a few clients, some of whom have also used it’s content management system to maintain and add web pages to their sites.

Back in 2006 I needed to make quite a few changes to the system to get it working in such a manner as to be easy to use for website owners, and to perform to it’s full potential with regard to search engine optimisation.

During this two year period WordPress have been making improvements to the core system, which has meant my intervention has been required less and less - and that’s a good thing.

So last week when it was announced WordPress 2.5 Release Candidate 1 was to be made available imminently I was very excited and installed it as soon as it ‘hit the streets’. RC1 seemed very stable and gave me an insight into the likely extent of the changes, which are many and varied. The admin section has had a major overhaul and will take a bit of getting used to.

The good news is that if you’re new to WordPress you won’t have to re-learn where everything is. If you’re already using an earlier version all I can say is it’ll be definitely worthwhile upgrading for all the added improvements you’ll have access to. And don’t worry I’ll be here to help.

Moving on, WordPress 2.5 was released yesterday and within 3 hours I had the basic system installed on my own website. In truth, I hadn’t intended installing version 2.5. The reason for this was because when I started making preparations for upgrading WordPress in the morning it still hadn’t been released! But when I was ready to download the WordPress install file the stable version was 2.5 and not 2.3.3. I was so surprised because no-one knew when the final stable 2.5 version was going to be ready - it was just an amazing coincidence.

I finished the installation at 03:30 this morning, it was a complicated one, trust me!

Now I have a site totally operated by the latest version of WordPress for both the web pages and the blog.

Was it worth it? You betcha!

I’ll make another post in the next few days detailing the beneficial changes of this new release.