WordPress Gets Major Overhaul

Trackbacks/Pings (Trackback URL)

1. Michael Arrington
   

   March 29th, 2008 at 4:10 pm

   matt had five teeth removed? from the video.

   anyway, can’t wait to install this, have all our plugins break and then bring the site to a screeching halt. will give us something to do around the office

2. jon
   

   March 29th, 2008 at 4:12 pm

   Wow, looks like it’s upgrade time…

3. Michael Arrington
   

   March 29th, 2008 at 4:12 pm

   no multi-blog interface. and what about related products? there is a whole suite of things wordpress needs to be building that they aren’t. their competitors most definitely are.

   I am really wondering if wordpress really cares about being a solution for big blogs, or if they think the market is in millions of one person shops. that may be the right thing for them, but i’m not sure its the right software for us.

4. jon
   

   March 29th, 2008 at 4:13 pm

   Mike are you hinting towards a switch to something else?

5. Michael Arrington
   

   March 29th, 2008 at 4:17 pm

   wait, the concurrent editing feature makes no sense -

   “Concurrent editing protection — for those of you on multi-author 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 work? I bet that added a few words to your vocabulary. Now if you open a post that someone else is editing, WordPress magically locks it and prevents you from saving until the other person is done. You’ll see a message like below.”

   This IS a big problem, but stopping you from saving until the other person is done doesn’t prevent overwrites. What they need to do is tell you that someone else is editing explicitly (and who) in the interface when you open a post for editing. That way you know to wait. Locking the post, which you wouldn’t know about until you hit save, is giving you the information too late.

6. Michael Arrington
   

   March 29th, 2008 at 4:21 pm

   jon - we’ll stay with WP until something is better enough, taking switching costs into consideration, to get us to move. One thing the WP team has been amazing at is helping us when things go wrong. The problem is that we are larger than most blogs, so we’re effective QA on the software and plugins. Something may work fine until it tries to scale to our size, then it breaks. Yes, WP always helps us. And to be fair we try some pretty stupid stuff sometimes.

7. Marco
   

   March 29th, 2008 at 4:22 pm

   Looks nice and clean. I cant stand 2.3.

   If someone can make a wordpress plugin that lets you edit images (rename, crop, resize) while in edit mode I’ll be eternally in your debt.

8. Ujwal
   

   March 29th, 2008 at 4:30 pm

   have been testing 2.5 for a week or more now.

   its definitely a marked improvement.

   I agree with Michael on the “multi-blog” thing. that needs a lot of attention.

   we have actually made a travel site based on just wordpress but the multi-blog feature is one improvement we have been looking for. right now. you just have to create another wordpress folder and use it. Not really appropriate for us.

   but good work guys ! appreciate all your time and troubles to improve things thanks.

   ujw

9. Andy Gongea
   

   March 29th, 2008 at 4:31 pm

   This free package is pretty valuable and I think we should appreciate the effort and the overall productivity and ease in use of Wordpress.

   Thanks Matt & co.

10. Michael Arrington
    

    March 29th, 2008 at 4:36 pm

    Andy - I agree. It’s amazing how many CMS options are available today to allow sites like ours to run a business. Couldn’t do that even a few years ago, and we owe it to innovators like wordpress/matt.

11. diystartupnews.com
    

    March 29th, 2008 at 4:36 pm

    the easist upgrade I have done. It works a treat.

    Mike why don’t you upgrade crunchnotes first and have a play with it there.

    The new front page has a great feature where tells you how many draft posts there are which is real useful for http://diystartupnews.com as when people submit stories they are added as drafts until they are approved.

12. Marco
    

    March 29th, 2008 at 4:42 pm

    I’m very grateful to Wordpress. It’s been an amazingly simple yet powerful platform for us. Thank you Wordpress team.

13. TriviaMania.com
    

    March 29th, 2008 at 4:43 pm

    Almost looks like a demo we should have seen back in… 2003.

14. Trace
    

    March 29th, 2008 at 4:47 pm

    Looks like there are great improvements, but Michael hit it on the head with multi blog features and I feel strongly that the new “write” screen is more than a few steps in the wrong direction…. they’ve taken all the functionality from the right hand column and moved it to the bottom where you must scroll to get it and then have less ability to move it around at will….. which is great for beginners and is no doubt what they were trying to accomplish……but what happens when “beginners are up to speed and want to actually have the functionality that has been taken away in 2.5?

15. Doug Stewart
    

    March 29th, 2008 at 4:47 pm

    There’s already a WordPress multi-blog option: it’s called WordPress MU.

    http://mu.wordpress.org/

    It’s a very near-sibling to the software that runs WordPress.com. I use it to host ~10 blogs for friends and it’s fairly easy to use. The current version still feels like 2.3, though it is due to get rev’d shortly to make it a lot closer to WP 2.5 in look, feel and even functionality.

16. elvirs
    

    March 29th, 2008 at 5:09 pm

    WordPress is great, we love worpress!!!
    just saw this post and wrote about it on my blog in Turkish:)
    new admin panel with widgets is great.
    congrats WP/Matt, keep it up!!!

17. Trace
    

    March 29th, 2008 at 5:11 pm

    @Doug - I’ve built sites with MU such as brokerlab.com and there is little to no documentation, very little in the way of community, and unless you are a PHP pro it is not for you……as many in the MU forums will rightly inform you if you have issues………. MU is not a viable Multi User platform for the masses or even for many commercial ventures in its current form. If it was TechCrunch, CrunchNotes, and the entire TechCrunch family would be running it…..instead they have separate installs….. are there lots of sites running MU? Of course, but the bar is and should be high enough that bug, scaling, db, and other issues aren’t piece-mealed together as you go as is the case with mu. Tried domain mapping in MU? Simple for some, not so simple for others……..have fun rummaging through the MU forums if you are not a MU veteran….

18. elvirs
    

    March 29th, 2008 at 5:11 pm

    I agree with trace, taking tags and categories down to bottom will not come handy for those on laptops with 15.4 inch screens.
    Well tags have new features and controls and need wider space, which is at the bottom, but they could keep categories on right sidebar menu.

19. Saptarshi
    

    March 29th, 2008 at 5:20 pm

    You can always try MU from wordpress…

20. Philip Arthur Moore
    

    March 29th, 2008 at 5:34 pm

    @Michael

    I just took the new version for a spin and don’t really see a great difference between the database for 2.5 and 2.3.3. A fair number of plugins on the WP website have also been updated to run up to 2.5.

    With that said, I understand your hesitation to upgrade.

    Along those lines, do you guys run a lot of plugins right out of the box from the Extend section of the WP site or do you mostly tweak them to fit your needs?

21. Glenn
    

    March 29th, 2008 at 5:44 pm

    To the upgrade mobile - awaaay!

22. Q dub
    

    March 29th, 2008 at 6:17 pm

    Wordpress is great, but it does feel like they’re in no hurry to implement new features. I’m still not sure why Wordpress MU isn’t merged with Wordpress yet. I doubt it is really that wasteful for 1-blog sites to use an MU-enabled codebase, but it certainly does suck to be maintain two separate brances.

23. Philip Arthur Moore
    

    March 29th, 2008 at 6:44 pm

    @Q dub

    I disagree with you regarding the integration of WPMU and WP into one package. While the code between WPMU and WP is not very different, WPMU takes a heck of a lot more resources to run than WordPress. See the following WPMU forum post: http://mu.wordpress.org/forums.....4&page It’s pretty clear that there is a major difference, at least in execution, of the two concepts.

24. Hagia Sophia
    

    March 29th, 2008 at 6:50 pm

    It’s time to upgrade my blog

25. Sean Hayford O'Leary
    

    March 29th, 2008 at 6:52 pm

    Michael said:

    “no multi-blog interface. and what about related products? there is a whole suite of things wordpress needs to be building that they aren’t. their competitors most definitely are.”

    Michael, I’d like to see features like that, too, but I’m really concerned about WordPress’ feature creep. Back in the day, WordPress was a slim 300kb. This latest release weighed in at 1.2mb — still pretty small, but 4x the size it used to be.

    The new features and interface of WP 2.5 are great, but I think the time is soon approaching when the WordPress crew will need to start from scratch (like Gallery did with Gallery2), hopefully building a better-organized, more modular piece of software (like Drupal).

    Q dub said:

    “I’m still not sure why Wordpress MU isn’t merged with Wordpress yet.”

    WordPress MU seems much more fickle and complex than WordPress. It just does a bunch of things that Joe Blogger doesn’t need. If WordPress were to create a multi-blog set-up in their main distro, I think it’d be better to do like Movable Type does, with an administrator controlling the creation of all blogs.

26. Michael Gorey
    

    March 29th, 2008 at 6:57 pm

    I’ve had four plugins not work out of about 20 I use across four sites: Benjamin Sterling Galleries, Google Calendar and Lester Chan’s print and email plugins.

    Lester made the interesting comment on his site that the plugins worked in RC1. His beta versions of those two plugins work with 2.5.

27. Graham
    

    March 29th, 2008 at 7:18 pm

    Good if it works, try it out and i’ll make my decision then!

28. Michael Kimsal
    

    March 29th, 2008 at 7:22 pm

    Something many people who are dissing the concept of a merged MU version seem to miss is that many bloggers’ needs evolve over time. I’m talking with a company right now who started with wordpress 3 years ago. They’ve now evolved in to 5 different sites, all running distinct installs of wordpress, but it’s all one organization. They’ve got about 20 people working, and that’s a lot of management/headache to deal with. They’re looking at moving to expression engine. This may be seen as an extreme, but I don’t think it’s an unheard of situation.

    If WP did a good multiblog version but charged for it and gave a smooth upgrade path, that would solve a lot of problems for people reaching the practical limits of single-site WP. As it stands, they don’t seem to be doing much to address those needs. The long term message will be stronger for other platforms who take WP refugees, who can rightly start making the claim that starting with WP is a bad idea, because you’ll eventually need to switch once you become successful anyway, so why not just start with a non-WP platform from day 1.

    WP seems to be focusing too much on short term by not addressing the multi-site blogger needs more aggressively. Long term this will be a strategic mistake.

29. Blowski
    

    March 29th, 2008 at 7:33 pm

    The design looks nicer, but beyond that I can barely see any difference between 2.5 and 2.3.

    The tagging functionality in 2.3 looked like it was thrown in at the last minute, with HTML hard-coded into the tag clouds, and weird filtering issues. These issues haven’t been resolved at all.

    Wordpress’s marketing seems now to revolve around being the simplest and most common blogging platform, rather than being the best in all situations. Maybe there’ll be a fork in the code in the near future, with a focus on stability and performance, instead of features.

30. damon
    

    March 29th, 2008 at 7:54 pm

    old school source code management systems were all about checkout and lock the file, causing all sorts of problems…

    new school (not that new really) like cvs and subversion are all about resolving changes at checkin time, makes sense here as well seems to me

31. Chris Jacobson
    

    March 29th, 2008 at 7:58 pm

    I updated my installation and I’m very impressed. The automatic plugin option along with the media library is outstanding.

32. Don Wilson
    

    March 29th, 2008 at 8:31 pm

    Wow, Michael. Some harsh, yet very understandable and true, statements in your comments above.

    I’m not sure what I think about the WP developers themselves helping with your installation directly. Does that mean their product doesn’t survive under harsh conditions unless they intervene specifically?

33. Anil
    

    March 29th, 2008 at 8:48 pm

    “Something many people who are dissing the concept of a merged MU version seem to miss is that many bloggers’ needs evolve over time. I’m talking with a company right now who started with wordpress 3 years ago. They’ve now evolved in to 5 different sites, all running distinct installs of wordpress, but it’s all one organization. They’ve got about 20 people working, and that’s a lot of management/headache to deal with. ”

    Actually, Michael, this was one of the key points we’ve been trying to emphasize in talking about what Movable Type does uniquely well. Though in retrospect it should have been obvious that some parts of the blogosphere would rather focus on personal attacks and the like, the goal was to refocus the conversation on what it looks like when platforms are designed to anticipate and support success. That company you’re talking to might well be ready for a platform like MT that has supported multiple blogs for almost 7 years, and has had things like a file library, a customizable dashboard, and better security for quite a while now.

34. iWalk
    

    March 29th, 2008 at 9:09 pm

    2.5 looks a liitle like Mac style, cool~

35. CARversation.com
    

    March 29th, 2008 at 9:22 pm

    WORDPRESS NEEDS TO DO MORE AND HAVE MORE FEATURES.

36. dunke yao ming
    

    March 29th, 2008 at 9:51 pm

    WORDPRESS blog furniture dining table & chair

37. bob cobb
    

    March 29th, 2008 at 9:54 pm

    I just installed it on a smaller site of mine and the photo upload tool isnt working anything like that video. Is anyone else having issues with this?

38. deuts
    

    March 30th, 2008 at 12:05 am

    More and more features? I think I would like to hold back on that one. If that’s the case, WordPress would not be as lightweight blogging solution that it used to be. I’d rather go for a slow but sure improvements and developments….:D

39. Galen King
    

    March 30th, 2008 at 1:14 am

    Fantastic. I do like Wordpress but have felt it’s in need of a bit of an overhaul for some time…. look forward to seeing the changes.

40. Avinash
    

    March 30th, 2008 at 2:05 am

    This major overhaul had to happen sometime…and they finally did. Thanks WP.

41. big
    

    March 30th, 2008 at 8:12 am

    interest

42. Iarfhlaith
    

    March 30th, 2008 at 8:16 am

    @everyone

    Upgrading on my own blog as I type this. The new interface looks great in the promo videos and I hope it’s every bit as fluid to use as it seems to be.

    I particularly like the look of the new multi-image upload feature. The new widgetized dashboard is a welcome upgrade as well.

    @ the nay sayers

    Yes, multi-user features are fairly limp, but for single site bloggers, is there really anything to moan about here? Looks like Wordpress has pulled out the stops for these guys (myself included).

43. Michael C Taylor
    

    March 30th, 2008 at 10:19 am

    @Michael Arrington

    Just out of curiosity… what plug ins does Tech Crunch rely on?

    And would you ever be willing to post some screenshots of YOUR Admin Dashboard? I’m sure its not that exciting - but I’d love to take a peak “behind the curtain” as it where.

44. Ted
    

    March 30th, 2008 at 11:19 am

    There’s a conflict with Wordpress 2.5 and K2, the best theme around. You’ll need to update your widgets-removal.php file in the K2 theme. Here’s my summary http://www.last-child.com/how-.....ing-to-25/
    but ChaoticTech deserves the kudos for coming up with such a fast fix.
    http://chaotictech.wordpress.c.....-fix-that/

45. Steve
    

    March 30th, 2008 at 7:17 pm

    If you’ve made tweaks to some of the files, do you have to re-modify the files (sidebar.php, etc.) if you upgrade to a new version of Wordpress?

46. dave
    

    March 30th, 2008 at 7:51 pm

    @steve - no, those are theme edits, you only need to be certain that the plugins they support are working in 2.5 (most are, but visit the codex to be sure)

47. Jorge
    

    March 30th, 2008 at 7:57 pm

    I was so disappointed in the havok WP 2.5 reaped upon my blog that I switched to another platform. I couldn’t decide which alternate I liked best, so I’m running a Drupal/Movable Type hybrid. Suprisingly, it works quite well.

    It’s like Auttomatic is just trying to make giant leaps backword for every small step forward.

48. honestmall.com
    

    March 31st, 2008 at 8:41 pm

    thanks ted for the K2 info!