Spontaneous Monotony

Although Wordpress 2.5 missed its release date last week, there is now a ‘release candidate’ available. For those of you who have lives aren’t familiar with software development stages, a ‘release candidate’ means that the software is considered to be in a release-worthy state, but isn’t officially released yet. Of course the practice of releasing ‘release candidate’ versions for public download over the internet means that the term is now almost as much of a joke as the ‘Google Beta’.

Wordpress 2.5 RC1 is now running on this site. Although its main visible change is in the administration interface. The new interface is - aside from the mysteriously buggered plugin upgrader which presumably is the reason why 2.5 missed its release date - very good indeed. Much easier to navigate, a fresher colour scheme, pretty much everything that I thought was wrong with the Wordpress admin interface seems (touch wood) to have been solved. There is also however a new feature for readers in that your Gravatar will now be displayed alongside your comments - if you have one. Gravatar is a service that - once you register - will allow you to associate an avatar with your email address. Whenever you leave a comment on a Gravatar-using site, it will check your email address against Gravatar’s database so that your avatar can appear. This saves you registering accounts on a billion different blogs (well, other websites too, but blogs are the main users of Gravatar) just for the purpose of having an 80px square image appear next to your name.

Anyway, if you see anything that looks screwed up then I’d appreciate it if you could drop a comment on this post - not that I’m expecting Wordpress to be buggy or anything ;P

Links

• Download Wordpress 2.5 RC1 (direct download link, 1.28Mb Zip file)
• Gravatar