Gabfire design tips Web design-development and WordPress news

At last, after all these days of scramble and gamble, here we have it “WordPress 2.5“. There are sample details floating over the internet, on this massive improvement by WordPress. We already have mentioned its release in our WordPress news section, but just to say a massive improvement and not mentioning its deeds is quite ill. So its here for all the bloggers and users around, “Brand new features in WordPress 2.5“. This article will cover all new user features embedded with the WP 2.5, lets get started!!.

Cleaner, faster, less cluttered dashboard — New Dashboard is focused on the most relevant tasks at hand: a quick summary of what’s published and scheduled for publication, the latest comments and incoming links, blog stats, and WordPress updates and news. You can add your own RSS feeds and edit the way information is presented so that the new Dashboard conforms to the way you use WordPress. Wordpress in collaboration with Happy Cog have taken the first major step forward in the WordPress interface since version 1.5.

Dashboard Widgets — The dashboard homepage is now a series of widgets, including ones to show you fun stats about your posting, latest comments, people linking to you, new and popular plugins, and of course WordPress news. You can customize any of the dashboard widgets to show, for example, showing some score on your favorite Football match instead of WP news . Even new plugins can be added, which can be added to the widget array, so this make widget management simple and also provides a lot of features and comfort to users.

Multi-file upload with progress bar — Uploading has always been troublesome in older versions of WP, but not anymore because , with all new Multi-file upload and Progress bar indicator, you can upload multiple files on the same time, uploading more than one photo was an exercise in patience, as you could only do one at a time. Those days of waiting are gone, with the new Upload progress bar, you need not wait unknowingly for hours, because you can see the progress and the ETA for the complete transaction.

Concurrent editing protection — There are many multi-author blogs around, the most grave problem that they face is editing issues. Have you ever opened a post while someone was already editing it, and your auto-saves kept overwriting each other, irrecoverably losing hours of work? I sure understand the agony it causes. Now if you open a post that someone else is editing, WordPress magically locks it and prevents you from saving until the other person is done. You’ll see a message like below.

Few-click plugin upgrades — This feature makes you so easy to upgrade all of your installed plugins. You do not have to download, unpack the update, remove the old version of the plugin, and instal the latest version manually. WordPress 2.5 will do all jobs for you automatically. If the plugins you use are part of the plugin directory since 2.3 WP told you when they have an update available, Now they have taken that to the next logical step, downloading and installing the upgrade for you.

Friendlier visual post editor — A new type of editor has now been added, there were many user complaints on those old versions saying that they do often get troubles on editing and formatting their topic, Hence to solve this issue, WP 2.5 has come up with a unique post editor which is sure to give you the best posting experience. WP now uses version 3.0 of TinyMCE, which means better compatibility with Safari, and they have paid particular attention in this release to its integration and interaction with complex HTML. It also now has a “no-distractions” mode which is like Writeroom for your browser.

Built-in galleries — when you take advantage of multi-file upload to upload a bunch of photos, WP have created a new method which provides us a new shortcode that lets you to easily embed galleries by just putting [ gallery] (without the space) in your post. It’ll display all your thumbnails and captions and each will link each to a page where people can comment on the individual photos.

Search posts and pages — search used to cover just posts, now it includes pages too, a great boon for those using WordPress as a CMS. New themes can style or sort pages differently in results.

Tag management — you can now add, rename, delete, and do whatever else you like to tags from inside WordPress, no plugins needed.

Password strength meter — when you change your password on your profile it’ll tell you how strong your password is to help you pick a good one.

I conclude Part 1 of this topic here, but Part 2 is sure to give you more details from the developer point, so be sure to get a glance on all the user features and then get ready to enter the next generation of blogs with WP 2.5