Looking at WordPress 2.5

My immediate reaction: WHEE! New! Shiny! Whoa, where’d THAT come from??!!??

Now that I’ve had a chance to click around and actually experiment with it, I have a few pouts. It would seem that I’m not able to rearrange the write page via drag & drop – and I want to be able to do that.

I am a huge fan of working with drafts. At the moment, I have no fewer than ten in various stages of completion. I write and then walk away for a while, letting the topic marinate. In the previous versions of WordPress, clicking the “save” button automatically put the post into draft mode. Now the page saves, but stays right in front of my lost train of thought, mocking me. Would it be that much trouble to include a “Save as Draft” button??!!?? There’s plenty of room right there, next to “Save” and “Publish”, see?

Oh, The Drama. The Indignity!

The “add media” seems to be a nice enough change to the previous “upload files” function. I’m not a heavy media user, and I’m not a big fan of galleries in general. My OOC shots are in file folders by date, y’know?

I’ve lost two three plugins to the upgrade: the LiveJournal Crossposter (which triggered a fatal error and cannot be activated) and the Tag Suggest Thing which didn’t trigger a fatal error, but doesn’t work properly nonetheless. And the MySpace crossposter triggers a MySQL error when I click the button to publish. Hopefully they’ll receive loving attention from their writers soon.

And speaking of plugins, there is an issue with the automatic plugin upgrade script. I’d already read Lorelle’s excellent article on the subject, but have run into a different problem. Most of the plugins I use have multilayered folders, with a main folder containing both the plugin folder and any screenshots/readme files I may need to refer to. The automatic plugin function simply unpacks and places the whole shebang in the directory. Hooray, I don’t have to download/upload. BooHiss, I still have to move the files to where they belong.

The comment management panel gets a huge thumbs up, just for improved functionality. Now if a comment goes into the moderation queue, all it takes is one click.

And that concludes this first-through look. Coming soon: I’m going to *gulp* turn on the visual editor and hope it doesn’t send my blood pressure into the atmosphere.