WordPress 2.5 in the Wild!

This morning at WordPress 2.5 release was released live at WordCamp Dallas! So gitty up and upgrade!

When you first try WordPress 2.5, it will feel like it has changed a lot, possibly for the worst (my wife Julia had her concerns). Change is hard. Take a deep breath, and be patient with yourself and WordPress as you explore the new experience. You will surprise yourself how adapt at change you are, and I’m betting you will soon love the new WordPress.

We did hide a few bugs in there — remember there is no such thing as “user error” — so take notes of the problems and challenges you encounter. Write them down when you first encounter them, reflect on which you think are the worst, and blog about them, discuss them on the forums, mailing list, or report them in our bug tracker.

Only together can we make WordPress even better by fixing the worst problems in maintenance releases (the next likely in about a month), and fixing the other challenges and most important us working together to incorporate all your ideas!

The product speaks for itself, but I often find the WordPress participants too modest to blow their own horns, so here is what Matt wrote:

The Community is Growing

More than growing, it’s on fire. We always talk about things like downloads, and the 2.3 branch has already had 1.92 million downloads as I write this post, but this time we have some far more interesting information I’d like to share.

There were over 1,200 commits to our repository since 2.3.0 and over 90 people were credited in them. This means in our core code, not plugins, there were at least 90 individual folks that contributed something high-quality enough that it made the cut to be part of the download you guys get today. I had no idea this group of people was so large.

Outside of the core commit team, there was particular help from these people, in rough order of number of credits and tickets: mdawaffe (Michael Adams), azaozz (Andrew Ozz), nbachiyski (Nikolay Bachiyski), andy (Andy Skelton), iammattthomas (Matt Thomas), tellyworth (Alex Shiels), josephscott (Joseph Scott), lloydbudd (Lloyd Budd), DD32 ( Dion Hulse), filosofo (Austin Matzko), hansengel (Hans Engel), pishmishy (James Davis), ffemtcj, Viper007Bond, ionfish (Benedict Eastaugh), jhodgdon (Jennifer Hodgdon), Otto42, thee17 (Charles E. Free-Melvin), and xknown (Alexander Concha). Also want to thank MichaelH and Lorelle on the documentation side, and moshu, Kafkaesqui, whooami, MichaelH, Otto42, and jeremyclark13 for helping with support.

And that is just a very small slice of the people that make WordPress the best blogging software in the world! I always want to write more about the people that make WordPress special for me. I would love to read about the people that make WordPress wonderful for you.

I’m Biased, But Try Movable Type and Drupal

Anil Dash has written an article titled “A WordPress 2.5 Upgrade Guide” on the official movabletype.com blog. It is full of misdirection, and, thankfully, overall it hasn’t been well received. What excites me is it has sparked some excellent discussions, and it’s a great launching point for more conversations.

I whole heartily recommend you try the open source flavor of Movable Type. It is clearly a great product created by fantastic people.

If you are thinking you only have time to try one other blogging software than WordPress, my time and money is on Drupal. People bringing Drupal into the conversation as an alternative has been one of my favorite parts of the discussions. Built on the same PHP stack that powers WordPress and much of the rest of the high performance web. Drupal is the full featured CMS with the heart and minds of the open source communities (I hang out with). Its blogging experience isn’t as polished out of the box as WP or MT, but it’s getting there — and we’re working hard at staying focused and one step ahead of them ;-)

If you have time please do share what you love about these other personal publishing environment, particularly if it relates to something that annoys you about WordPress. This way WordPress participants can respond by letting our code do the talking.

If you are currently using WordPress then your highest priority will likely be to plan to take a look at WordPress 2.5 as a release candidate will be coming very soon — watch the WordPress Development blog for the news.

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Media Library and WordPress Plugin Challenge

WordPress 2.5 will be the first release with more than a rudimentary image and media experience right out of the box. There are now add media buttons in the editor, the manage menu includes media library, and there is a gallery.

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Surfin’ WordPress 2.5 with Safari 3

With the release of Mac OS X Leopard (10.5), the simple, elegant, fast web browser Safari 3 is here.

Very soon we will release WordPress 2.5, and about the same time WordPress.com will be updated.

With Safari 3 and WordPress 2.5 you should finally have a great experience if Safari is your preferred browser.

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Jacob Santos, “I’ll provide a patch after I graduate”

“Sorry, I’ll provide a patch after I graduate. I don’t have the time at the moment.” writes Jacob Santos aka darkdragon, in WordPress bug ticket #5860 Activating plugin that uses upgrade functions (dbDelta) fails , and I think he was serious. Reading that put a big smile on my face!

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WordPress Trunk, More Feed, Less Plugin

With changeset 6763 on WordPress trunk (soon to be WordPress 2.5), when I select Full text in Settings > Reading I now get… you got it, full text feed.

Ryan wrote in the issue ticket, “Looking back, this was a mistake. By popular demand, we’re returning to disregarding the [<!--more-->] tag when serving feeds.”

And with this change, with everything else WordPress 2.5 will give me, I now need one less plugin. I get to retire Ronald Heft Jr’s Full Text Feed.

Updating WordPress Plugins 2.2 to 2.3 and to 2.5

Jennifer Hodgdon, WordPress Plugin Development Documenter extraordinaire, has written Migrating Plugins and Themes. This seems like a great resource for the WordPress plugin developer who may have been putting off updating their blogs.

As she says, “it’s a Wiki — feel free to add/clarify/edit/fix.”

Jennifer continues to provide essential contributions both to the codex and in development. The new tag interface in Write and Manage->Tags in 2.5 are largely her work. Jennifer, I salute you!

WordPress 2.5 beta is coming soon!