I’m a web-designer who’s followed and respected Jeffrey’s career from afar for several years, so it’s very disappointing to see him associated with such a lame release of Wordpress, and even sadder to see the fanboys leaping to his blog without taking even a minute to critically assess the upgrade.

I found after upgrading an ‘in production’ site to 2.5 that It perhaps wasn’t the best idea. This was a shame, because there are some very nice new features in WP 2.5, but unfortunately it’s difficult to see them clearly due to some of the other more fundamental negative changes.

The biggest part of Wordpress, the Write screen, is functionally worse than its forebear. If that screen doesn’t work well, it casts the rest of the upgrade in a poor light.

My particular concern is that the Write screen has actually slowed down a previously quick and streamlined workflow. It’s now easy to forget to set categories because they are below the fold, so you end up editing posts far more.

Other elements were moved to below the Write screen from the sidebar, which has created wasted space and means we have to scroll up and down more. Drag and drop ordering of these items has been removed.

The drafts summary is now missing from the top.

The permalinks editing initially looks nice, but is flawed. Seems reasonably robust on posts, but for pages it’s broken. It’s created automatically on the first auto save from your title — and if it’s not what I want I have to edit it? Why should I need to edit something I was going to write from scratch? Additionally, if you edit it before publishing, the edit isn’t “real” UNTIL you publish.

There are serious bugs with custom fields.

I could go on, but there’s little point, many others have discussed it ad infinitum, and WP don’t seem interested in hearing the voices of the disgruntled user base. I’m very disappointed with the upgrade and won’t upgrading any of my other blogs.

I’ve been using WP for not quite a year and loved it’s ease of use and extensibility. It’s still a great piece of software, but something went seriously wrong with this update. Too many cooks maybe? I can’t pretend to know a huge amount of what goes into open source development on such a scale, but if the comments from developers on WP Trac are anything to go by, nobody can ever seem to agree on anything! Not a good way to build a market leading product, free or not.

This upgrade has left me eyeing up Expression Engine and Symphony.

Stephan - On the test setup I have, the only plugin that didn’t work was Popularity Contest, which is a good sign from that particular standpoint. However, the downsides that I’ve got do keep me from upgrading all the way around.

Jude - First, the reason your comment kept getting hit by the spam filter has to do with the unfortunate fact that there are tons of spammers who use the .info domain for their sites, so I’d added it to my spam blacklist, which is why you got the message. I’m not so sure why others (especially those who are very much in favor of the new version) don’t do such an in depth review, but it might be something along the lines of if someone’s happy, then they’re more willing to just mention it, but if you’re not happy, you will make more comments about it…

MrCorey - I think you’re seeing more and more folks just sticking to the stable releases, but it’s always good to have folks willing to test out newer versions. Also, have you upgraded? What do you think of it if you have?

Aly - I know that you can change the colours, but they really hide it away (in the user profile section), but to be honest, the “classic” colours aren’t that hot either…

Lorelle - That’s a fair reason to have the new version released when it is, and to be honest, I haven’t followed the exact dates of previous releases, so if the weekend is the “normal” release time (outside of security updates), then you’re just following suit.

While your points about security are quite valid (and the reason that I’d upgrade from 2.3.3 to another version in the 2.3 branch, which is only fair to keep open because in my opinion, 2.5 is a completely different product to the 2.3 branch; kinda like what Firefox did with maintaining support for 1.5 for a period of time after releasing 2.0), the fact that so much that didn’t need to be changed was changed, along with totally borking the Widgets page, with little to no actual explanation as to the reason it was changed, makes me a bit leery to upgrade my main blog.

Also, I still have heard nothing about how the interview process was taken out, or about who exactly got interviewed as well. It goes back to my point of the fact that other than the occasional security breach, 2.3 and all the previous versions of WP that have the current Dashboard weren’t broken, yet it was decided that it “needed” to be fixed.

Snos - You know that I agree that this is a step backward - plus (because it seems some folks think I have this wrong), the fact of the matter is that you could install a plugin (that is on the WP plugin site), and when you choose to update it using the inbuilt upgrade thing, the author might (for who knows what bizarre reason; I know it wouldn’t make sense to me) try to corrupt a file in there. Yes, it’s an extreme case (and one likely to never happen), but you have to think of all the possibilities when coming up with ideas for features.

Thanks for all of your comments.

Security is not enough to make people upgrade to something that is a major step backwards, Lorelle. And Wordpress 2.5 is a major step backwards. Just one look at the text widget screen is enough to tell anyone that. Plus Wordpress 2.5 comes with some rather large security holes of its own, perhaps you did not read Sephy’s post to see the point he made about that.

They have now put it on wordpress.com, and are having some serious issues with it there too.

Many are holding back, waiting for the bugs to be worked out, but the support forums are getting mostly human mistakes reported and very little true bugs. There are, however, some very serious security vulnerabilities that have just been announced in past versions, which 2.5 fixes. That’s a serious reason to upgrade sooner rather than later. A lot of blogs, some by just normal folks with little traffic, are getting hacked. WordPress is not alone. I’m reading about a lot of security issues with Drupal and other blog programs, too. Some days I think it’s war out there to get all us bloggers. So upgrading for that reason might be reason enough.