WordPress 2.5 Release Candidate 1 is now available. If you are interested to see an overview of changes from WordPress 2.3.x to WordPres 2.5 - check out the WordPress blog article: 2.5 Sneek Peak.

So many of my clients love WordPress but hate the WYSIWYG editor.
The problem:
When users try to add content with HTML within the content - then go back to edit it, save it, and their custom HTML becomes a mess. For most - simply disabling the rich text editor (Users > User > uncheck “Use the visual editor when writing”) is good, but others like to use the editor except for a handful of posts or pages.

The solution:
Download and install WP Codeshield. This plugin will make sure that the rich text editor does not touch any custom HTML code within . All you need to do is wrap around your custom code and you can forget about any more issues with the rich text editor and any HTML you put in/edit.

*Note - if you put this in place and your outputted HTML text looks different than everything else (it is using a monospace font by default) - add : code {font-family:inherit} to your style sheet and the text will not look out of place.

Great news for WordPress theme developers. WordPress 2.5 now offers a new conditional tag: is_front_page(). We have long lived with other options (is_page(’home’)) or other logic like that, but the is_front_page() simplifies defining the “home page” in our templates. Thanks guys!

I took some time today to download the latest version of WordPress (2.5 beta 1) and decided this would be a perfect opportunity to switch to using subversion to manage my WordPress updates. Now that I am all switched over - updates will be much easier to manage.

My initial thoughts and opinions on WordPress 2.5:

• The upgrade was painless - 5 minutes.
• All my plugins worked except for my “Secure Admin” plugin - but that was out of date.
• My theme works fine - after I made some adjustments to some of my AJAX features that relied on an outdated version of Prototype.
• The new admin interface is well laid out for the most part. I am still not sure I am sold on the really light colors, but I will give it some time to grow on me.
• The admin interface is cleaner - it no longer shows artifacts like post and category ID which only a few of us use. (If you want to see the post ID or cat ID, just hover over the edit link next to these items and you can see it in the URL - thanks Demitrious)
• The post interface is much elongated due to the options that were once available in the right hand column (categories, password protect post, etc) are now below the post box instead of next to it. This is going to take some time to get used to.
• Overall - this is a big release and I look forward to working with the changes and enhancements.

For a no-nonsense way to set the order of your Blogroll links within Wordpress, place a numeric value in either the description or notes field then set up the wp_list_bookmarks function to order by that value. Make sure numbers that are < 10 are put in as two digits (01, 02, 03). This is not ideal, but it is quick and easy...and it works.

Once you added in the links to the Blogroll admin, use the following function: wp_list_bookmarks to display your links on your site. The following example will list all links and order them by the value in the description field. The output will not have "blogroll" nor the link category headings. For more information, check out the wp_list_bookmarks documentation.