LimeTouch

After a delay of almost 3 weeks, WordPress 2.5 has finally been released. It took the developers together with the ever helpful community a staggering 6 months to come up with this release, that was how a big a change was made from 2.3. Many excited users like myself immediately downloaded the zip and starting having a play-around with the new features available.

It has been widely publicized that the WordPress admin will be undergoing a major makeover. However the new color scheme hasn’t really sat in with many users, not me though. Not to worry, the old color scheme is an alternative or if you want to set your own colors, Planetozh has a guide as to how you can do just that via a plugin.

Apart from that, WordPress are also spotting some new features themselves, just going to highlight a few which I really liked. For the full list, head down to the development blog.

Search posts and pages

We have been crying for this change to be made for far too long now and it has finally been implemented. Now when you search a blog, it not only looks at posts but also pages. In fact, you can give it a test run now, try typing ‘facebook’ and search, you will notice the ‘about’ page is listed in the results.

Tag management

Previously I was using Advanced Tag Entry to handle the management of my tags (editing and deleting) but now tag management is included within the core and that plugin has since became redundant. It should never have required a plugin before and I am glad the developers realized it too. As you enter your tags, it would also give you suggestions of tags which you might have used in the past.

Few-click plugin upgrades

This will definitely be the feature which many users would absolutely love. Whenever a new version of the plugin is released in the WordPress Plugin Repository, you can have the option to upgrade automatically. The process of downloading and extracting of the plugin, uploading and eventually activating it would be handled for you.

All you need to do is simply provide your FTP details and there you go, a task made simpler. Probably next there could be a way to handle few-click WordPress upgrades, that would really make the day of users who have had so many problems with upgrading their WordPress versions, now would it?

Built-in galleries

When you use the multi-file upload to upload a couple of pictures, you can then use the [ gallery] (without space) tag in your posts to display them in a gallery style and each picture would have its dedicated space for comments. I have also noticed that the quality of the thumbnail has been increased in the release compared to the release candidates.

If you want to modify the quality of your thumbnails, open up wp-includes/media.php and scroll to line 178:

Look for $jpeg_quality=90 and change it to the number of your preference. For me, I do not want my thumbnails to be of poor quality, so I chose 100.

Gravatar integration

All along I have been using Gravatars 2 to display the gravatars of my commenters as well as myself. But with the latest get_avatar() code, I can easily display gravatars on my blog without relying on Gravatars 2 to do it for me. Another plugin which I no longer require.

Full text feed

I am sorry if I had to irritate my readers who had subscribed to my RSS feed in the past by having display only a small part of the post. Now they won’t have to click on the read more link to read the entire post content and they have the luxury of reading my posts via their RSS reader.

WordPress has a makeover too

With the release of 2.5, not only did the admin go through a make over, WordPress did too, adapting to the colors of the fresh color scheme. It is a much needed change to the all so familiar white and blue color combination. However it doesn’t really come as a surprise to me. Since they are redesigning the admin, why not throw in a new design for WordPress as well? And they did.

I have already upgraded to 2.5 and this post was written using the new admin. I have also made some modifications to my current theme so that it would no longer require the Gravatars 2 plugin to display gravatars. Speaking of themes, I will leak out a secret. It is called codename ‘Mocha Lime’.