With all the buzz on everybody’s blog about the release of Wordpress 2.5 RC2 get me all hype on getting my fingers on it. So i searched from the official wordpress website but i cant seem to find the download link. And of course, that doesnt stop me so i googled it and find a link for a download. I immediately installed it at my laptop and i start travelling in new world of wordpress.

The first thing to notice (but not really important) is the login page that looks like this

Of course this module dont get much alteration. But the new form design for this page is quite interesting, it has more subtle color than the old version. Carry on…

The first dashboard view is newly designed with a different navigation structure for administration process. As you can see the “Write”, “Manage”, “Design”, “Comments” menu are separated with the “Setting”, “Plugins”, and “Users”.

The word “Design” has been evolving since wordpress first developed. It has change from “Themes”, to “Presentation”, and now “Design”. I honestly curious about what this “evolution” is all about though. But, never mind..

In the bottom content, the dashboard page has 4 RSS section from Recent Comments, Incoming Links (backlinks from other web), RSS from wordpress development forum, and RSS for plugins.

The “Write Post” page is also experiencing major tune-up as we can see from the image on the left. In the old wordpress, the form is build vertically which can be seen from the “submit” button in the bottom section. But in WP2.5 RC2, the submit button is positioned on the right sidebar along with other frequently used options. While under the textarea is placed “Tags”, “Categories”, “Excerpt”, etc using like a “click to expand” DOM-Menu.

The other thing you may notice is the “Add media” menu on the top the textarea, next to “HTML” and “Visual” tab. We’ll.. this new feature is quite a major change for the new WP. From this window, we are able to upload any media file (image, video, audio) from our local computer and organized in “Gallery” tab, but there’s a catch. After you upload a file, make sure you click the “Save Changes” button, or else you file wont be saved in the “Gallery”. And i also find a bug from this new feature, the “Gallery” menu actually wont work using my Opera browser. In other browser (Mozilla, Safari) i can click on media item and it rolls down to show the details, but somehow this fails on my Opera.

Another new feature is a feast for the admins. The new WP now provide “Admin Color Scheme” for the whole administration section. Well, they actually give out the same color scheme, but the first one has more contrast, and the other one is more soft. Can we actually add new schemes? Add our own color? I dont know that yet…

There’s actually another difference that WP2.5 have is on the TinyMCE textarea. I dont really know who developed this, Wordpress or TinyMCE.. but its a good idea and very usefull. When you use the TinyMCE textarea for posting or editing, you can try CTRL+V (Paste) and it will respond by opening a new window for inserting you Pasted items as Plain text or as text Object like HTML, or from Office pages.

Another bug that i just found is on the permalinks. When i changed the permalink structure with %post-name% in it, it failed to work. Instead of displaying %post-name% it displays the post-id.

Well thats just about it. I Know this post is so far from enough, but i’ll try to post a new review on this matter in a short while. And, one more thing.. if you’re having problem on finding a download link for Wordpress 2.5 RC2, just download here. Its my own copy of the zipped file, and i swear i didnt do anything to it. =).

But if you can find a download link from the official website, good for you and happy blogging.