WordPress development team has announced the new release candidate of the WordPress blogging platform. The 2.5 release does not have a slew of new features. This release is focused on user experience and how to make it easy for everyone to use WordPress. By default the blogging platform hides away the unnecessary and advanced features from plain view. This makes the interface look very clean and user friendly. Unfortunately the top-level menus and submenus still require clicking through to individual pages and this adds precious time to switch between each action. I would love to see drop down menus instead of page links which would make the experience much quicker. In this way users can focus more on writing quality content and less on navigating.

WordPress development team describes the new release with a ton of feature enhancements. ”A customizable dashboard, multi-file upload, built-in galleries, one-click plugin upgrades, tag management, built-in Gravatars, full text feeds, and faster load times sound interesting?” WordPress has come a long way since its inception and the plugins and features make it a very powerful blogging platform. The various screenshots of the WordPress 2.5 release are presented below. I tried to include all the images that have changed from the previous release. A word of caution to all those who want to upgrade their WordPress installs – this is not the final release. So there are plenty of bugs and plugin incompatibilities. Before you upgrade your primary blog I would strongly recommend look for upgraded plugins. If possible test the new WP 2.5 release on a test system which is completely separate from your primary blog. Download the new release and take it for a spin. Otherwise check out the screenshot gallery below.