Paul Walsh, the Irish Opportunist

Guest post by Kamrul Hassan.

WordPress 2.5 (A.K.A. Brecker) made its delayed debut nearly 2 months ago (March 29, 2008), after spending almost six months in development and is a major milestone for WordPress. WP 2.5 not only added dozens of user-requested features, it included a performance boost on both backend and frontend. WordPress 2.5 branch released WP 2.5.1 just one month later - it includes over 70 bug fixes, performance enhancements, and one very important security fix. Naturally, the feature list remains the same as WP 2.5, so I will keep the discussion focused on WP 2.5.

The list of new features is long (better to read Matt’s post to get the epic) but above all there is the cleaner, faster, semi-customizable, less cluttered administrative interface. The dashboard i.e. the administrative homepage, is a bunch of widgets you can customize to show anything that uses RSS feed (you can’t edit two widgets-Recent Comments & Plugins). Plugins can also hook into this dashboard, for example the WordPress.com stats widget adds a handy double-wide stats box.

The file upload feature received a major makeover, with progress meter and multi file/folder upload capability. When you upload images with EXIF metadata, WP 2.5 will extract all the data into custom fields, for use on the posts - this is great news for people who uses digital camera. While I am on this topic, I should also add that WP 2.5 now has its own built-in Gallery system. You might want to check this documentation for advance usage.

Two of my personal favourite features are the built-in tag management and salted passwords -the phpass library based password hashing and storing (bye bye brute-force for pass). Another notable feature that authors of most multi authored blogs (e.g. Segala blog) will welcome, is concurrent editing protection. Only one person and edit a post now, so no more overlapping each other’s work.

A new WYSIWYG editor is a major improvement. Unlike the old one, it won’t break your code (Paul was for ever breaking the code for embedded video/audio and then turning to me to clean his mess :)) inserted on code-view when you switch back to Rich editor. You will also notice four fancy add media buttons on the top-right corner of the editor. This allows you to add images, audio, videos and other media (ex. PDF) to your posts/pages. The video adding feature is sweet for those who are into YouTube or hosting their own video, just two clicks and you’re done.

Other new features include Password strength meter (like Gmail and MSN Passport), ability to Search posts and pages etc. What you see is sometimes determined by your hosting provider.

If you’re geek you’ll enjoy  the Shortcode API to make southend bracket-delineated strings which can keep the complex embed code intact, optimized DB structure that makes WP db faster, easy argument base taxonomy and URL creation, secure cookies and $wpdb->prepare() like function that allow almost all of the SQL on WP to be prepared first, to prevent SQL escaping.

I know WordPress 2.5 isn’t perfect or complete, there are and will be issues. But the most important thing is that WP 2.5 is a milestone of commitment to the open source community. The development team are constantly making improvements and are extremely quick to react to implement security fixes

Note: You should upgrade to WordPress 2.5.1, unless you applied just the security fixes through custom hack.