I have been a fan of WordPress since it’s incarnation. It was the best (free) alternative to MovableType. Back then I was a Microsoft junky and favored ASP 3.0. I wound up coding my own blogging CMS for the first 2 years of WDP. I remember the night WordPress 2.0 came out. I installed it immediately (on another blog) and I was extremely impressed. The use of AJAX in the admin panel was cool and cutting edge back then. WordPress has always been easy to install and very intuitive. 

For those of you that don’t know, What Da Phuk! is running on a patched version of 2.3.2 (patched xmlrpc). I had been keeping my eye on the development of 2.5 and I must say, moving items around the dashboard does not an update make. Especially not a major release. I guess it’s not a “major release” but the way it’s been hyped it might as well be 3.0.

A few days ago, the WordPress dev crew announced that 2.5 is stable and ready. The key features include:

1. a customizable dashboard
2. built-in tag management
3. media galleries
4. full text RSS feeds (that’s not very impressive)
5. automatic plugin updates
6. faster load times

The load times (which were fixed in 2.3.3) make the update worthwhile. The WYSWYG content editor needs a lot work. They can’t go to Beta with it in it’s current state. The additions to TinyMCE (no, not a rapper) are nice – easy image, video and file upload…but what is up with leaving the old media buttons? They need to get rid of those modules because they take time to load. If I had more “free” time, I would strip Tiny and add FCKeditor or Xstandard to the repository. Hopefully someone will do it or at least create a decent plugin for it.

Overall, I am pretty happy with the 2.5 sneak preview. One thing that desperately needs to be added to the trunk…analytics. Firestats is practically useless. Who is up for adding phpmyvisits…anybody?