The new iteration of the platform that powers this weblog and a handful of others was pronounced good to go today by Automattic’s Matt Mullenweg at WordCamp Dallas. I wonder how many WP users just dropped whatever they were doing – doing chores around the house, perhaps, or interacting with family and friends – and rushed to WordPress.org (given a shiny new interface in conjunction with the new edition announcement) to snag the new hotness? This being Saturday, though, a lot of those folks may not yet have heard.
Add WordPress.org: It looks good. Much better than before, and I assume that the usability pros at Happy Cog were behind the redesign. (Wrong! It was Matt Thomas who did the redesign. Thanks to Matt Mullenweg in comments for the correction.) The new look extends throughout the site, even to the forums. The Codex remains a unregenerate holdout, but not for long, I hope.
Must admit that I like the new look for WP.org better than the new look for WP 2.5. Shhh! Don’t tell anybody! But we’ve talked about that one aspect of the new edition before and won’t belabor it today.
I’ve been using development versions of 2.5 in my test install for a while now and have been keeping up with revision news via wp-testers, so this upgrade is just one more install for me. I’m pretty well prepared for changes necessitated by the new edition and, well, am feeling fairly smug about it. More interesting to me is the brief glimpse of the interactions between contributors afforded by the testers mailing list. It’s like an Amish barn-raising, but without the noonday meal.
To those folks: deserved congrats for pushing 2.5 across the finish line. Celebrate, but not for too long: I hear version 2.6 is due in just four months.
Oh – when will I upgrade? Soon enough. I know that some folks have been running their production blogs on release candidate versions of 2.5 for a while now, and more power to them, but I prefer to take my time. Besides, I’m busy this weekend.
Update: Since writing the above I’ve upgraded my test install and was sufficiently satisfied to upgrade another blog as well. This latter upgrade was done in order to make use of 2.5’s beefed-up mass editing feature. It’s proving helpful, but it would be even more useful if it was capable of displaying all posts within given parameters instead of just fifteen. Makes for a slower deletion process than I’d like. There may be some way to diddle the code to get WP to display more selected entries; I’ll look into that. Still, it ought to be part of the feature.
Speaking of slow: it takes over a minute for 2.5 to delete those fifteen entries. Better than doing it one at a time, of course, but…
Hey! Delete time is now down to thirty-five seconds. Much better.
Update: This blog – yes, the one you’re soaking in – now upgraded to 2.5 without a hiccup. Woo-hoo! Will talk about it in greater detail in a separate post.