Err, sorry for that childish breakdown of purposeful misspellings, lolcat-esque grammar and misuse of capital letters, I just got a bit excited. This thing is 10000% better than Wordpress 2, and I mean it. I loved Wordpress 2 from the minute I started using it, but, sort of in the same way I love VectorDesigner, it bugged me in a lot of small-ish ways. The Wysiwyg editor messed with my posts, plugins had to be manually updated, the dashboard was almost entirely useless, and the interface would quickly become cluttered with the multitude of space-hogging plugins. Wordpress 2.5 fixes EVERYTHING that I hated about Wordpress 2, and then ads on top of it with some amazing features that I never knew I needed until now.

The new feature that I really like is the easy picture uploader, and inserter. You can use it for individual pictures or you can easily make really cool gallery pages and stuff (which I will demo later on). I think wordpress 2 had something like this, but it wasn’t anywhere near as smooth. This uses a lightbox style effect to put all of the dialogs and stuff into a neat and clean window. There are similar dialogs for video, audio, and other media (like embedded flash I presume). Lemme tell ya, these dialogs will save me SOOO much time I now don’t know what I would ever do without them, and this is the first post I’ve written in 2.5! So maybe I’m being a bit dramatic, but they’re great, I can do more with my blog now that inserting stuff is seamless. I do have a few disappointments, for example you can’t grab a youtube link and have wordpress auto-insert the player for you (which would be really nice), but other than that it’s just really neat.

There are also a lot of little things that add to the overall experience of wordpress. The interface is much brighter, neater, and cleaner. Lists are better laid out and easier to read (like the Page Manager, pictured left), Tags auto-complete, categories sort by most used, little things like that. There are also some little new features that can add some more customizability to your blog, like the ability to edit the permalink of the post (notice the permalink for this post doesn’t have the FULL name of the post in it, to keep the URL short). Everything is much better laid out, and in general just looks better. I must say though, I was a bit shocked when I first logged into my new Wordpress, it is REALLY different from 2.0 in visual style, and things are laid out a bit differently, so there might be a tiny bit of a learning curve.

It’s not absolutely perfect though, it still has some (major) bugs, like, oh, not being able to add images when using Safari, but I’m sure they’ll get those sorted out. Overall: TOTALLY FRICKEN AMAZING! 463.58 Million thumbs up. Now, to demo the spiffy gallery feature:

1. WordPress (2.1)
2. Drupal (5.1)
3. Vox (?)

Round 1: Ease of installation

Well, naturally, this catagory comes first, it’s the first thing you have to do. So, Wordpress and Drupal (as of 5.0) both have installers that simply ask for your MySQL database account details. Drupal’s is very basic, after installing you still have to set up an account and rename the site. The wordpress installer not only installs wordpress to your MySQL, it alse asks you for some basic info about your site (Title, etc…), and creates an account for you. The account it creates has to be named “admin”, and you do have to go through changing the password from the random junk it generates to something you can remember. I should point out that the WordPress installation is REALLY easy at wordpress.com (you just create an account). Both WordPress and Drupal create “Hello World” pages, anoying in my opinion, but some may find it useful. Vox doesn’t really count, you don’t install it, there is no host-your-own Vox. The setup is very easy though, sign up, select your theme, give it some info about you and your site, and your done. This may be the most time consuming of the methods, it requires email confirmation and everything, but it is very easy to follow and leaves you off with a kinda customized, ready to go site.

1. Wordpress: 9
2. Drupal: 8
3. Vox: 9
   

Round 2: Posting your first post

So, what is the first thing you do after installing? You test it out. Once you’re logged on to WordPress it is very self explanatory. There is a link on the very first page you see that says “Write a blog post”. Once there you just write it, catagorize it, and publish it. Wordpress comes with the TinyMCE editor build in, so you can add some formatting to your text with or without HTML. Once you’re at the ‘Write’ page it is very easy to write a page too. Drupal is also very easy, although there are some extra hoops to jump through. First of all, you have to dig a little bit once you’re logged on to find the ‘Post’ page. Once there you’ll see a big … text feild. No JavaScript Rich Text Editors (eg. TinyMCE) come pre-installed. To get one you first have to make sure your theme is supported (mine isn’t), then download a plugin (or 2, depending on the editor), then install it. After that drupal has many options about what languages are supported in the post, who can read it, etc… WordPress also has a lot of options, but not quite as many as Drupal. Vox is in the middle, you do have to find the “My Vox” menu at the top of the page, wait for it to scroll down, then select “Compose”. After you figure that out it is very easy not only to write a blog post, but to post multimedia content as well. It is more limited feature wise than Drupal or WordPress, but it still has a lot of the features I need.

1. Wordpress: 9
2. Drupal: 5
3. Vox: 8

That’s all for today Folks! If I didn’t split it up like this you’d end up with some unreadably long post, and I’d be sitting here all day. Stay tuned for the next installments.