iPassion

WordPress 2.5 is the culmination of six months of work by the WordPress community. A customizable dashboard, multi-file upload, built-in galleries, one-click plugin upgrades, tag management, built-in Gravatars, full text feeds, and faster load times… sound cool? Then WordPress 2.5 might be the release you’ve been waiting for to upgrade your WordPress 2 powered website!

For a brief overview of the features with screenshots, visit WordPress.org sneak peek announcement for RC1. Or check out a 4-minute screencast of the new interface in action.

But if you’re in a hurry, here is a bullet list of the major changes in this release:

• Revamped user interface, features a new fresh and better organized look and feel.
• Cleaner, faster, less cluttered dashboard with widget support (yes, you can customize it now!)
• Multi-file upload with progress bar. Now you can select a folder of images or music or videos at once and it’ll show you the progress of each upload.
• EXIF extraction — if you upload JPEG files with EXIF metadata like camera make and model, aperture, shutter speed, ISO, et al. WordPress will extract all the data into custom fields you can use in your template.
• Internal search engine now searches in both posts and pages.
• Tag management — you can now add, rename, delete, and do whatever else you like to tags from inside WordPress, no plugins needed.
• Password strength meter
• Concurrent editing protection — Now if you open a post that someone else is editing, WordPress magically locks it and prevents you from saving until the other person is done.
• One-click plugin upgrades — if the plugins you use are part of the plugin directory WordPress will be able to download and install the upgrades for you.
• Friendlier visual post editor — Includes version 3.0 of TinyMCE, which means better compatibility with Safari. New full-screen editor gets you a no-distraction area to focus on your posts.
• Built-in galleries — when you take advantage of multi-file upload to upload a bunch of photos, there is a new shortcode that lets you to easily embed galleries by just putting [ gallery ] (without the spaces) in your post. It’ll display all your thumbnails and captions and each will link each to a page where people can comment on the individual photos. Matt is using this feature on his blog and already uploaded over 1,200 pictures into 23 galleries!

There are also a number of new developer features, here is a summary:

• Salted passwords
• Secure cookies
• Easy taxonomy and URL creation
• Inline documentation
• Database optimization
• $wpdb->prepare()
• Media buttons
• Shortcode API

Want to learn more about these? Check out Matt’s original post on WordPress.org.