WordPress 2.5 … here we go

Yesterday I saw that a Release Candidate for Wordrpress 2.5 had come out. After months of not really keeping up with WordPress happenings, it just so happened that I had recently started working on my blog so the 2.5RC1 release was perfectly timed. I had decided to scrap everything that had been at this domain before and start fresh so I only had a couple of posts and one plugin installed. I figured I might as well try upgrading since I didn’t have much to lose. I was also excited to try 2.5 because I had seen Dean Robinson’t admin theme, Fluency, and I thought it looked really good, but it only runs on 2.5.

I took a couple precautions before starting my upgrade (did an export from the admin, downloaded my uploads directory, as well as my lightly modded version of Fauna and my single, lonely plugin). Once this was done I deleted all the old WordPress files off my server and uploaded the 2.5 files. I am not sure if this is how one is supposed carry out an update, but it worked pretty well for me.

After running the install script, I imported my backup file, and uploaded my theme, plugin and upload files. I set the WordPress, theme and plugin preferences to what they had been previously and went to take a look at my site. It looked….exactly the same. Success! Then I came back and took a look at the admin. Definitely much cleaner and clearer, but I am not a big fan of the 2 layered horizontal navigation, so my next step was to install the Fluency admin theme, which I also managed to do without any difficulties.

So now everything is working just the way I want it to. I haven’t used WP2.5 much yet, but so far, I like the new “Write Post” page, which is much cleaner and logical in its layout. I like that post drafts are auto-saved (I think that’s new?) and I like the image uploader and the ability to choose custom thumbnail sizes. I am sure I’ll find more things to like (and dislike) as I use it a bit more, but for now I am pretty satisfied.

As an aside, I used Dave Shea’s slick Simulacrum Photoshop effect on the pic in this post. It is easy to do (thanks to his clear instructions) and I think the results look really good.