Since WordPress 2.5 was released over the weekend, there’s been an avalanche of posts. This is my little snowflake of a contribution.
As Reuven Lerner remarked, the emphasis of the new release is on usability. That’s usability for the blogger/admin: usability for the reader depends on the theme, and on other administration choices.
I’m running 2.5 on one of my other blogs. I still find the interface a lot cleaner. I can even see how categories and tags being shifted down the post page, which I don’t like, can be seen as part of the spring cleaning.
I really appreciate the upgrade to plugin management. The plugins screen told me that a new version (1.1) of the Yahoo Media Player plugin was available, and a few clicks later, I was running the new version, with no need for any explicit downloading and uploading.
Usability has long been considered a weakness of free/open source software. It’s good to see GPL’d projects, such as WordPress, making usability a priority. WordPress.com, where this blog lives, should be getting 2.5-ized soon.