If you’ve been following the developments on the WordPress blog, you’d know that the new official release of WordPress 2.5 is out.
Besides better image handling – the new version has a pretty comprehensive built-in gallery (WordPress head developer honcho Matt Mullenweg did a preview screencast of the new gallery), it also has features like an enhanced in-built tagging feature, integrated analytics (so you get a better idea of your traffic picture without having to go to Google Analytics), a redesign of the user interface that should allow for more intuitive posting.
What’s uncertain is if embedding videos and other code requires having to muck around with the blog settings, because WordPress hasn’t really “played nice” with PHP, javascript and flash files in it’s previous incarnations.
Also, there’s a big question mark about the compatibility with WordPress plugins (generally developed by third party and independent developers) designed for earlier versions of WordPress.
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So the $64,000 question (or perhaps in today’s context, the $1million question…) is (more…)
Pound-for-pound, WordPress is my preferred blogging platform of choice, in terms of flexbility, customization and ability to optimize for SEO and traffic generation.
The current version, 2.3, still has a number of issues yet to be resolved, but the great thing is that the Automattic and third-party plugin developers are constantly chugging away at the hardest working blogging platform in my eyes.
Ryan Boren, part of the WordPress development team, just put up his “s/2.4/s.5/g” post that the WordPress development team will be skipping WordPress 2.4 and releasing WordPress 2.5 in March, together with the promise of “some big new features”.
What’re the “big new features”?
No secret really, if you check out the WordPress roadmap.
If you drill down to the specific WordPress 2.5 milestone level, you will find details of some of the features being worked on.
For example, WP 2.5 will have the ability to search through static “pages”, in addition to the “posts”.
Tweaks for WP plugins and cache (which should give better blog performance, as a cache file would require lower resource overhead compared to a .PHP script), uploading of flash and 3gpp files.
And a host of other features designed to make WordPress an easy platform for new bloggers.
For the comprehensive and somewhat gory list of WP 2.5 milestones, you can look here.
WordPress bloggers can rest easy knowing that the development team is on it…
