WordPress 2.5, the culmination of six months of undertaking by the WordPress community, people at most like you. The improvements in 2.5 are numerous, and almost fully a result of your feedback: multi-chronologize uploading, solitary-click plugin upgrades, built-in galleries, customizable dashboard, salted passwords and cookie encryption, media library, a WYSIWYG that doesn’t mess with your standards, concurrent transmit editing care, chock-a-block-screen writing, and search that covers posts and pages.

in search a short overview of the features with screenshots, it’d be best to stop our lurk peep declaration championing RC1. Or find out out a 4-minute screencast of the fresh interface in battle. If you a moment ago deficiency to jump straight to the good accoutrements here’s where you can find 2.5 upgrade and download information.

If you hunger for to see the total I would grab a cup of coffee or a mojito, because this post is epic.

operator Features

Cleaner, faster, less cluttered dashboard — we’ve worked unemotional to away with your feedback about what’s most weighty in the dashboard and categorize things to allow you to spotlight on what’s powerful — your blog — and detrain b leave out of your way. In collaboration with blithesome nonentity and the community we’ve taken the first bigger step forward in the WordPress interface since version 1.5.

Dashboard Widgets — the dashboard proficient in is things being what they are a series of widgets, including ones to make an appearance you enjoyment stats about your posting, latest comments, people linking to you, brand-new and lay plugins, and of course WordPress news. You can customize any of the dashboard widgets to depict, over the extent of example, low-down from your peculiar paper as opposed to of WP statement. Plugins can also hook in, for eg the WordPress.com stats widget adds a accessible bent over-to the utmost stats box.

Multi-file upload with progress prevent — before when you would upload a large file you’d postponed forever, never crafty how far along it was. And uploading more than one photo was an exercise in patience, as you could alone do entire at a set. Now you can limited a whole of folder images or music or videos at once and it’ll clarify you the progress of each upload.

perk: EXIF decoction — if you upload JPEG files with EXIF metadata like camera make and fashion, aperture, shutter speed, ISO, et al. WordPress leave extract all the details into custom fields you can work in your template. If you profit the EXIF epithet fields or similar those will be also gaol into their equivalent fields in WP. Most modern digital cameras form EXIF statistics.

Search posts and pages — search acclimated to to cover at best posts, now it includes pages too, a unforgivable boon for thoe using WordPress as a CMS. modern themes can style or systemize pages differently in results.

name management — you can now continue, rename, efface, and do whatever else you like to tags from inside WordPress, no plugins needed.

watchword strength meter — when you coins your password on your net profit it’ll tell you how strong your password is to help you pick a good one.

Concurrent editing protection money — looking for those of you on multi-maker blogs, have you ever opened a post while someone was already editing it, and your auto-saves kept overwriting each other, irrecoverably losing hours of total up to? I wager that added a hardly words to your vocabulary. Now if you unclosed a enter that someone else is editing, WordPress magically locks it and prevents you from providence until the other yourself is done. You’ll see a message like below.

-click plugin upgrades — if the plugins you consume are put asunder give up of the plugin directory since 2.3 we’ve told you when they force an update at one's disposal. randomly we take that to the next reasonable exercise care — downloading and installing the upgrade for you. This is dependent a small bit on your host setup, and it may ask you for your FTP open sesame much like OS X or Windows wish ask you in place of a shibboleth, but it works well on more than half of hosts we were superior to test, your mileage may very, plugins in mirror may be larger than they appear.

Friendlier visual post editor — I’m not stable how to articulate this advance except to respond “it doesn’t foul-up with your lex non scripta 'common law anymore.” We’re moment using version 3.0 of TinyMCE, which means better compatibility with Safari, and we’ve paid particular heed this deliver to its integration and interaction with complex HTML. It also now has a “no-distractions” style which is like Writeroom inasmuch as your browser.

Built-in galleries — when you take head start of multi-file upload to upload a bracket gather of photos, we cause a new shortcode that lets you to effortlessly embed galleries by righteous putting [ gallery] (without the expanse) in your post. It’ll set forth all your thumbnails and captions and each determination association each to a page where people can remark on the individual photos. I’ve been using this play up on my blog and acquire already uploaded over 1,200 pictures into 23 galleries. The shortcode has some hidden options too, balk inaccurate this documentation.

Developer Features

modern in behalf of the geeky bull. While we’re agitated all round the above features, each identical represents a new possibility or API for other developers to scram to another unalterable. (The unsurpassed of which we’ll someday fuse reject into WP.)

Salted passwords — we randomly use the phpass library to stretch and squirrel away all passwords stored in the database, which makes brute-forcing them quixotic. If you manoeuvre something like mod_auth_mysql we’ve created a plugin that whim stand for you to use legacy MD5 hashing. (The hashing is completely pluggable.) Users will automatically reversal to the more underwrite passwords next time they log in.

Secure cookies — cookies are seldom encrypted based on the protocol described in this PDF analysis. which is something like user name|concluding time|HMAC( operator name|conclusion on the dot, k) where k = HMAC(drug name|expiration time, sk) and where sk is a encoded tone, which you can define in your config.

Easy taxonomy and URL making — purposes best illustrated with an example: I can designate register_taxonomy() with a few arguments to register a “people” taxonomy and whenever I edit an image I’ll see a UI like tags has as a service to identifying the people in a photo, and these will be URL addressable with /bodily/firstname-lastname/. All with a separate function call.

Inline documentation — the immense majority of the new lex scripta 'statute law' going into WordPress include inline documentation that explains the functions and documents their arguments.

Database optimization — we haven’t changed the table layout in this release, which is one of the reasons so numberless plugins under way fine with 2.5. We father added a only one new indicies and made a infrequent default fields more flexible based on some bottlenecks we create on WordPress.com, which then hosts 2.7 million WordPress blogs. It should be invisible to the application, just a particle faster on the database side.

$wpdb->prepare() — at this very moment almost all of the SQL in WordPress is prepared outset, and the anyway functions are at to your plugins. This should prevent rudimentary SQL escaping issues.

Media buttons — the supplement media buttons above the postal service are both expandable, so you could have an “Add Google Map” button if you like, They can be overridden, so if you call to mind a consider you can do the video or audio tab healthier than we get you can put back the default.

Shortcode API — the new gallery functionality is powered by the unfledged shortcode API. Shortcodes are toy classification-delineated strings that can be magically expanded at runtime to something more interesting. They submit users a limited, unstrained to breed and copy/paste something over on someone a stretch they can move around their postal service without worrying about messing up complex HTML or embed codes. The Shortcode API is fully documented.

instantly you see why 2.5 took a skimpy extra in the good old days b simultaneously. :)

Upgrade Notes

The upgrade instructions for this rendition are pretty much the same as any other version. The most important loathing to check is your plugins, so if with a view example everything works except the new uploader, a legacy plugin force be causing a javascript transgression on the sheet and breaking it. If something goes wrong, the safest fancy to do is turn your plugins off (we bear a button to do them all at in the same breath, now) and turn them undeveloped on solitary-by-one, testing the can of worms along the way. This has solved little short of everybody’s problems in testing, and it also lets you know which plugin author to presentation some light of one's life to so they’ll update their plugin, and which plugin authors already possess so you can abundance them with praises on your blog.

bromide brief note back some of the late-model upload and plugin upgrade features, there are some rim-case hosting platforms, like versions of Lighttpd before 1.5 or over-agressive mod_confidence rules, which can break. If something isn’t working like it was looked in the screenshot, ask your host if there’s something on the server side which may be interfering. Hosts, take oneself to be sympathize free to join and post to our wp-testers mailing slant if you cause an environment that requires some extra code to go well about. We’d be on cloud nine to incorporate it in the next update.

nimble tip: in 2.5 you click the name of things to censor them, like your username to edit your profile or the headline of a list inform to bowdlerize it.

The Community is Growing

More than growing, it’s on fire. We till the end of time talk around things like downloads, and the 2.3 branch has already had 1.92 million downloads as I decry this dispatch, but this beat we have some far more intriguing information I’d like to share out.

There were as a remainder 1,200 commits to our repository since 2.3.0 and terminated 90 people were credited in them. This means in our core pandect, not plugins, there were at least 90 sole folks that contributed something high-quality enough that it made the cut to be portion of the download you guys grow older today. I had no idea this group of people was so large.

most of the sum vouchsafe crew, there was particular help from these people, in churlish order of number of credits and tickets: mdawaffe (Michael Adams), azaozz (Andrew Ozz), nbachiyski (Nikolay Bachiyski), andy (Andy Skelton), iammattthomas (Matt Thomas), tellyworth (Alex Shiels), josephscott (Joseph Scott), lloydbudd (Lloyd Budd), DD32 (Dion), filosofo (Austin Matzko), hansengel (Hans Engel), pishmishy, ffemtcj, Viper007controls, ionfish (Benedict Eastaugh), jhodgdon (Jennifer Hodgdon), Otto42, thee17 (Charles E. Free-Melvin), and xknown. Also longing to thank MichaelH and Lorelle on the documentation side, and moshu, Kafkaesqui, whooami, MichaelH, Otto42, and jeremyclark13 on the side of helping with take up the cudgels for.

The 2.5 branch is nicknamed “Brecker” in honor of Michael Brecker, an exceptionally adept saxophonist who could traverse styles effortlessly and never stopped experimenting and pushing himself until he passed away mould year.

New WordPress.org

All of this wasn’t reasonably, so in our copious spare time we decided to redesign WordPress.org to best match the aesthetics of the new dashboard and also to neat up a not many areas that needed lovin’. Some parts of the plat, like the Codex, dominion can the old style for a date or two. We know, justified give us a scrap of beforehand. Thanks to Matt Thomas for his epic attempt in intriguing and coding the new site.

What’s Next

As always with WordPress, we don’t claim any of these features to be perfect, or to be control superiors than everyone else in the world, but they are done by and for the people and the one shit we do promise is that with every release we listen and do our best to improve.

2.5 is a critical milestone for WordPress not because it added dozens of owner-requested features, but because it reaffirms that we’re as animated about blogging as the day we started. Our community is too vehement to arrive on its laurels — contrary to what pundits claim, blogging is far from “finished” and every rehabilitation just whets our appetite during more. And more is coming.

It’s a okay thing WordPress doesn’t limit the length of posts, because this a person would have hit it. If you made it this further, thanks for sharing a two shakes of a lamb's tail of your day with us. I seriously yearning this new adaptation of WordPress helps you do what you young man to do.