WordPress 2.5’s release has been delayed twice and it is now supposed to be released on March 17, 2008 which is today. To give you all a glimpse of the new features included in this version, here is my little report. The new release of WordPress will have the following upgrades.

An Overhauled Administration Interface

- The administration section will now have a different color scheme of light blue, gray and orange colors. I am sure this will bring some relief to the people who are bored of the old colors but can also turn off some loyal users. There will be two default color schemes from which the user can choose and apply their favorite one.

Here is an article on how to create your own admin color scheme for WordPress.

- The “Presentation” section has been renamed to “Design” and all your widgets, themes will be listed under this category from now on.

- The search functionality has been given extra power by allowing the users to search through the posts, pages and comments based on status, months and categories.

- A password strength meter has been included when setting up a password for a new user. This evaluates the complexity of your new password and warns you if it’s too short or simple.

- An additional option has been integrated into the dashboard called “Right Now” which gives you the option to write a post/page instantly and also shows the number of posts/pages/users and comments.

Widget-Based Dashboard

The Dashboard was one of the most boring pages of the admin section of any WordPress installation. It has been given a new kind of widget support where you can add/remove widgets just like the standard widget system that used to exist in the presentation section. This should allow the developers to code some interesting plugins for the Dashboard.

Automatic Plugin Updater

How many times have you checked the installed plugins list and found one or the other plugins requiring to be updated. To save you from the trouble, the new release comes with this functionality which allows WordPress to automatically update the plugins from the Author’s website.

New & Improved File Uploading System

Managing your uploaded files was not so easy before this new release. Now you can just go to a central place to manage all your uploaded media files. The media library will also allow you to upload more than one file at a single go. This will save time and effort on the part of any WordPress user. Also, when you upload your images, a new option called “medium” has been added to the existing “Thumbnail” and “Full size” images.

Tag Management Made Easy

Now, you will be able to manage all your tags from the admin interface which will be similar to managing categories.

Avatars are Official Now

The Gravatar Plugin is now incorporated into WordPress. Weblog Tools Collection wrote up the information on the new get_avatar() function to help WordPress Theme developers update their Themes and those who want to write Plugins based on the new avatar function.

Full Text Feeds

Listening to the popular demand, WordPress feeds now include all the content present after the “more” tag when full text feeds are selected.