I wasn’t expecting the final release to be so soon after the RCs, but it’s now available. It comes on the day I was intending to publish a new website — a personal project which uses WP 2.3 as it’s engine. Of course, it would be completely silly to do that, given that 2.5 address a lot of the problems I had and fixed using plugins, so I’ve decided to defer the site release for another week. It won’t make a lot of difference — I’ve been working on this site on and off for about 7 years but never actually put it on line!

So what’s different between the final 2.5 and the recent release candidate? At first glance, very little, although the WYSIWYG editor (TinyMCE) does now seem to preserve HTML a lot better which was one of my big issues. So, have a look a quick at my overview of the good and bad stuff or head on over to the Wordpress site and grab a copy for yourself.

Wordpress have released RC1 of version 2.5 of the Wordpress software. It’s been a while in coming but finally we can play with a more streamlined backend that promises a slew of new features.

I’ve downloaded it and have a test install running on my local server. I’ve had a quick play around with it and here’s a few good and bad things that I wanted to comment on:

The good

• Importing from my blog worked flawlessly, picking up all attachments and images and arranging them in the correct upload folders. Sweet!
• Gravatars are now built in
• Uploads management has been completely replaced with a new Media Library section which is a thousand times better. You can now have permalinks for all media too. This is a massive improvement.
• The Blogroll is now named Links and has been moved into the Write section, which makes much more sense.
• You can add media directly to a post with a media-management popup allowing you to browse for files and send the links and/or embed code directly into the post you’re working on.
• Images placed into your posts are automatically given classes for CSS alignment. This is long overdue and very welcome!
• If you use the visual text editor, you can make it full screen, which helps block out distractions while writing. Shame that I still use the code view due to Wordpress’ horrible HTML code rewriting (which doesn’t seem to have improved, though I haven’t extensively tested that yet)
• Some ‘Reading’ settings that were previously hidden in Options have now been sensibly moved to the Reading section
• The admin area can have colour schemes applied using custom CSS which can be selected in the user profile (it took me a while to find that!)

The bad

• Some plugins are now broken, but that was to be expected really.
• The new colour scheme is ghastly and overall the back end still feels a bit clunky. It doesn’t feel like a polished product.
• The write page now has a reduced side bar with most options appearing in collapsible panels beneath the Write window. This is a real waste of space and will mean more scrolling up and down to set things like the page-slug, ping status, etc. This seems an odd decision to have made.
• Still no button for creating nextpage code in your post
• Backend CSS for the admin area is still very messy and there still are not enough CSS hooks for skinning it
• The Plugins page has a very bad default colour scheme that makes it tough to see at a glance which plugins are activated.

These are only few of my observations and I’m sure I’ll find others as I get to grips with it. Overall, this is a great improvement so a big “Well done!” to all involved. I’m currently re-designing my website, so I’m looking forward to using 2.5 to power it.

GIF and I have been through a lot together. Over the years, we’ve argued over dithering algorithms, we’ve cried over Photoshop’s lossy compression and we’ve drunk the night away comparing palette reduction techniques. Then one day about four years ago, I built a site that required alpha-channel (semi transparent) images. I called up GIF: “Can you do this?”. GIF shuffled about, looked at his feet and dithered his palettes. “Um… no. Sorry.”

I spurned GIF and turned to PNG. PNG was gorgeous. She smiled at me and her IDATs twinkled. “I can do everything GIF does–and MORE!” She laughed, and teased me with her data chunks. She’d got me. I gave her images with alpha channels. She took them in her stride and returned highly compressed, lossless files. I gave her images for dithering; she returned beautiful optimized 8 bit palettes that put GIF to shame. She gave me everything I wanted and I loved her for it.

Everything with PNG was great–for a while. Then one day I discovered the truth. On an idle afternoon I had decided to compare the filesizes of an 8-bit PNG and an 8-bit GIF, compressed with exactly the same settings. The GIF was smaller! What!? My love affair with PNG was being rocked to it’s foundations. PNG had lied! How could she do this to me? (more…)