Wordpress has released a sneak peek into the new and and upcoming improvements in Wordpress 2.5. Most notable among these is the visual refresh in the administrative dashboard which, I must admit, looks very very slick. Gone are the monotonous blues and rectangular buttons, replaced by a bolder color palette consisting of orange, gray, blue and rounded buttons.

It is also said that the new dashboard is customizable. The article does not explain this feature in-depth, and the screenshots do not show any hints of customizability, but I assume this lets administrators choose which modules to load and where to load them.

Wordpress promises this to be more than simply a “fresh coat of paint”, and introduces a whole bunch of new features, which simply eliminates the need to install additional plugins that perform the following:

• Multi-file upload (finally!)
• Built-in galleries (Flickr support would be nice as well)
• One-click plugin upgrades
• Tag management
• Built-in Gravatars
• Full text feeds
• Faster load times

That may be a bit too much for some users, who may prefer to keep the core Wordpress installation at its barest minimum (e.g. lightweight), but the new features sure look handy.

Considering that this is a minor release (Wordpress is currently at version 2.3.3), the update seems a bit heavy. This makes me wonder how smooth the transition will be. Many sites have their blogs setup to the point where everything “just works”. If upgrading to 2.5 means breaking most existing themes and plug-ins, then I doubt the majority will be rushing in on the upgrade.

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