WordPress 2.5 Admin Preview/Review
After reading that WordPress was going to skip an official release of 2.4 and go straight for the 2.5 release in March I figured I would have a look at how it’s coming along. I was looking forward to a new update for my blogs because there are a few things I wanted fixed so not only did I want to see if these bugs were fixed in an upcoming release but I wanted to see if this new admin interface they’re talking about is indeed better than the current one.
I installed the latest build and took it for a spin, here are some screenshots with my thoughts.
- Login Page. Look is a little different, functionality is the same.
- WordPress Dashboard: They’ve changed the dashboard around a little. It’s cleaner and it seems they’ve removed a lot of the random stuff on the dashboard which is nice, I thought it was just cluttered anyways. The Right Now box seems to replace the Activity section but it’s more prominent on the screen which is nice. It appears the Incoming Links plugin might now be built in as well. The other information is pretty much the same, I do like the New Post and New Page buttons right on the dashboard, this makes sense to me because these are probably the most performed actions.
- The write page is where I see changes, and not really for the better in my opinion. It seems they’ve removed everything from the sidebar except the Publish Status box. This publish box moves with the page so you can always see it on the screen which is cool but I don’t think it’s very useful, I would rather have the sidebar. There is a new editor which is nice and I really like the full-screen mode which fills the screen so you’re free to type your post without scrolling. The windows have a new fold up feature also. Well, they have a new look anyways.
- I took this shot so you can see how the Publish Status moves down the screen and so you can see where all the admin plugins go. The plugin you see at the bottom I created to show this list and it worked great when it was at the top of the page next to the actual post. Now that there is no sidebar and everything seems to stack on the left side it’s useless. Any admin plugin that used to be on the sidebar will now fall under everything else on the left…kind of stinks.
- This shot was taken just to show some more of the design elements, most of the features in here and in the other sections not shown are the same.
Other then the new layout and the pretty new colors there is not that much of an improvement. I’m sure there have been a lot of changes in the actual system but I’m not too impressed with the new admin interface. I’m still hoping that in the next two months they will make some serious progress but…I’m not getting my hopes up too much.
Ooo! It looks lovely. Thanks for taking the time to post this - I’ve been thrilled with Wordpress, and now spend an unhealthy amount of time with it. Anything that beautifies the admin pages has got to be good (not that they were that bad).