What's The Big Deal With WordPress 2.5?

It is acually WordPress 2.5.1 at the time of writing this post, but what's the big deal anyway?

I only began using Wordpress in Feb 2006 but to me, WordPress looks like the most major overhaul to date of the entire backend and, it was delayed for about three months because of the number of additional features the developers wanted to add.

If you've not upgraded yet or, you're new to WordPress, you may not be familiar with the new user interface which now has a very light blue and grey color scheme. Under the user tab, you can now change the color scheme with one click to suit your preferred style.

However, the aim of this blog post really isn't to give you a nice little overview of the new WordPress interface, but mainly to highlight that in my view, the new WordPress gave some indication of the direction of the Internet …

What do I mean?

When I started blogging in 2006, just to change the style of the font, you had to edit the code which, is way too technical for most people online. The first and only theme I use for my blogs, Semiologic, released a version many months later that would enable you to change the font with one click but WordPress themselves haven't reached that level of sophistication yet. They have however changed the text editor to include some neat features to easily add audio, video.

Basically, with every change, WordPress puts the power of blogging into more and more people's hands giving them less and less excuse not to blog.

They haven't arrived yet, I was still a little shocked to note that whilst you can change the color of the header with one click, with all the talk about having a unique looking blog, WordPress still does not have a built in option to upload a new header with the click of the mouse.

Maybe I'm just spoilt having been used to Semiologic all these years, but I still think this and some basic elements like changing the font is something WordPress should consider for the future.

That said, I still think it's worth upgrading but cannot stress that if you have a developer specific theme like Semiologic that you should WAIT until they have upgraded their theme to be compatible with WordPress 2.5.1 - the current version.

Don't go crying to mommy if you take the chance and your blog breaks because, I can assure you, break it will!

Also, unless you are tech savvy, I would hold off upgrading until all the bugs are ironed out in both WordpPress and your developer's theme. I have spent the past two weeks upgrading all of my blogs, but it really has eaten up chunks of my time … especially when the feed broke because there was a conflict with one of the plugins.

Still shying away from blogging?

Go and download my Jumpstart Blogging guide which will show you the easiest way to set up your blog … step-by-step.

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