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:

At first glace is looks pretty, well, pretty. The windows have a sort of smoked glass look to them, the task bar is a glossy black, and the start menu is no longer as useless as MSN search. Unfortunately, first impressions do not stick; the Aero blur behind windows is poorley done, it looks like all it’s doing is taking a screenshot, shrinking it to a tenth it’s size, and stretching it out again, an effect photoshop junkies will know all too well. It’s blocky, grainy, and seems to turn white things grey. There are also these weird diagonal lines that go across the ‘glass’ that seem to have no real ‘meaning’, they’re just kinda there to confuse you when you move windows. As if windows weren’t normally bad enough, when you make them full screen, the semi-transparency seems to go away, the titlebar just goes blackish. Why? I have no friggin idea.

I also have a problem with the new Start Menu, it’s better than XP’s no doubt, but really not by much. It’s got that same ‘poor mans blur’ behind it, which I can honestly say I just find anoying. The “All Programs” list goes in the same  box that the default apps go in, and you have to scroll all the way to the bottom to get back to the default list thing. Even after 2 days the Recent Programs list was filled with, umm, bad links from spyware, yes, spyware, after 2 days! There is one icon at the top of the start menu that changes to reflect the icon of the item that you are hovering over, but it lags, so it really doesn’t help. You still can’t ever find what you’re looking for in the control panel, and even if you could, there are very few useful options anyway, like, no ‘Turn off this cruddy Aero” button. Blech.

And of course, even with a shiny new face, it’s still Windows. Internet Explorer still sucks, Viruses are still counted in the millions and bugs in the ten thousands, anti-virus programs still suck (grandads prevents me from getting on hulu), it’s still slow, it still bluescreens, and, through it all, people still love it. So y’know what, The best version of Windows ever made (which, of course, is saying very little), is STILL Windows 95, hence why I use a mac.