I tend to be a little slow to update SIlverPen Publishing, largely because I prefer to focus on content rather than aesthetics or the back-end of my site. I’d rather be writing stories and articles than messing with code, and so it’s not often that I update WordPress. Especially now that I’m using WordPress-MU; with regular WP, the user will receive an update warning, but WP-MU has no such feature. As such, I tend to forget.
Having some time to kill yesterday while waiting for Fedora to update in a virtual machine I’m building, I decided to go ahead and update. WP-MU had no indicator of what version I was using and I certainly didn’t recall, but I thought I’d give it a shot and see what happened. Imagine my surprise when I signed back in!
I’ve been using WordPress for about 4 years now and was shocked at the change when I logged in after updating. Once I’d cleaned the coffee off my screen and accepted the colour orange into my life, I was pleasantly surprised by what I found. More information has been loaded into the Dashboard, but more importantly, it’s information we want and need. My WPStats is now right there, information about my posts and comments has been moved out of the sidebar and placed front and center, and the informational updates about WP were moved to the bottom.
Previously, information about my posts and comments was in the sidebar, relegated to a place of relative insignificance, when the truth is that this is my blog and that information is of high importance. Meanwhile, the WP informational updates were big, bold, and took up most of my screen and, though they were very nice and occasionally helpful, they weren’t my first priority. These rearrangements were a welcome change.
After taking the above screenshot, I discovered the new Add Media button above the post window. I was delighted upon clicking on this button to see my browser lay a gray film over the window (using Lightbox, perhaps?) and open a box for uploading my image and setting its characteristics. This is a far cry from the old Uploads panel in previous versions of WordPress, and it certainly adds some flash to the action (no pun intended). Unfortunately, the flash uploader didn’t work for me, but I was still able to browse, upload, and tweak my image without a problem.
You will notice that Write Post (and other pages that use the same template) has gotten a significant makeover as well. On the right, you have a nice panel with buttons for previewing your post, setting its status, updating the time stamp (which now requires clicking “edit,” rather than being out in the open), and a few other links. Of particular note is the text right below the Save and Publish buttons that updates quickly and automatically as drafts are saved. A great deal more Ajax is being used in this version, but it doesn’t appear to be slowing the interface down hardly at all. Very nice indeed.
The plugins page has been modified some to match the overall theme, but nothing flashy here, which is quite alright. You’ll definitely want to check out Management though, which has been tweaked to display information in a much easier to use format. Also, though it might be a placebo affect, loading my posts seemed faster.
It’s going to take some time to get used to the new navigation structure, but all-in-all, I’m quite pleased with this upgrade. Everything seems to be working smoothly, the actual upgrade process itself was a breeze, and WordPress-MU 1.5.1 is certainly shiny. If you haven’t updated yet, you should.
PS It’s worth noting that prior to upgrading, Better Feed wasn’t working for me; I could activate the plugin, but when I went to its settings page, I was presented with a blank panel. After upgrading, everything seems to be working fine.
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