2.5 is coming along thanks to the fantastic feedback you guys provided on RC1 (over 580 pingbacks and counting), and we’re now ready to show you a bit more of a peek with a short screencast covering the new dashboard and uploader and Release Candidate 2. First here’s the screencast, which is also available embedded below, as a Flash movie, or as a 17mb AVI download:

I’ve uploaded more than a thousand photos already into the new gallery system — it works.

(This was my first screencast, but I hope we can have more on WordPress.org and our documentation in the future.)

If you make frequent backups and you’re interested in helping us out with development by testing the very latest, download and install Release Candidate 2 of WordPress 2.5, and join our testers mailing list to report any bugs you find in the code.

Finally with regards to theme and plugin compatibility, we’ve had no reports of any broken themes in this upgrade, which makes sense because we didn’t really change anything core about themes, just added new optional capabilities like Gravatars. Plugins that work with the admin may require updating to take advantage of the new, cleaner UI in WordPress 2.5.

The community has started to keep a list here of which plugins work great and which don’t. It’s worth looking at, or even better just deactivate your plugins before upgrading for 2.5 and let the built-in updater notify and give you one-click upgrades to plugins you have installed, assuming the developer is cool and has updated their code for 2.5 already.