Sandbox Development and Consulting Inc.

After upgrading a number of sites to WordPress 2.5 – the questions are pouring in over the new user interface and the new functionality. I have compiled a list of the top questions I have received so far.

1. I am getting weird PHP errors on my pages, what is going on? I have been busy with a lot of these issues and mostly from people who have updated to WordPress 2.5 but did not update any of their plugins at the same time. During the installation process – do not forget to grab the latest version of your plugins as well.
2. My thumbnails are squished – how do I make them look better? WordPress 2.5 allows you to set the size of your thumbnails as well as gives you a “medium” size image option. By default, WordPress uses this option: Crop thumbnail to exact dimensions (normally thumbnails are proportional). If you upload images that are not square – this will really make your thumbnails look squished. I would recommend un-checking this option. (Settings > Miscellaneous)
3. How do I turn on/off Gravatar support? This setting is located at the bottom of the discussion setting page (Settings > Discussion)
4. How can I link my images to a page (attachment) like I did in 2.3? If you want to link your images to a page with a bigger version of the image within your page template, you can do so by selecting “Post URL” in the “Link URL” field when uploading an image with the new media uploader. There is also a new template for this page – image.php. You can find an example template in the default theme.
5. My comments are not visible in the WordPress admin – what can I do to fix this? I have found this to be an issue on some sites with really outdated versions of WordPress. By executing: create index comment_date_gmt on wp_comments(comment_date_gmt); on the WP database – I have found that that usually clears it up. (Thanks to the WordPress forum thread on this)
6. What all changed? If you want a great overview (with a video) check out the WordPress blog post on WordPress 2.5

Hopefully these answers will help you with getting more comfortable with WordPress 2.5. There are a lot of big and small changes to this new version of WordPress and every day I use it – I like it more (and hope you do too).

WordPress 2.5 has officially been released. The new version includes over 1300 changes (see full changelog) and a variety of new features. For more information on WordPress version 2.5, read the official WordPress version 2.5 documentation.
Download the latest versions of WordPress: WordPress 2.5

In addition to the new WordPress release, the wordpress.org web site has a fresh new look. Great work!

After working with WordPress 2.5 on a few sites for the last few weeks, there are a few things I wanted to point out for people that will be soon making the jump to WordPress 2.5.

• The dashboard is now customizable. You are now able to choose what feeds show up! If you would rather other news sources - you can easily change the feeds by entering a new feed URL.
• The number of widgets you use is now unlimited.A lot of people wanted more than 9 RSS feed widgets, more than 9 text widgets, etc and now you can have as many as you would like.
• Managing media just got easier. There is now great built in support for a "media library". No more using multiple plugins for uploads - you now have all that functionality built in.
• Updating your plugins just got easier. You can now update your plugins with a click of the button - but this means you will need to save your FTP user name and password and then trust that the updated plugin code is safe. While this is very handy and will save a lot of time for people not comfortable with FTP - the cost is security to some degree. I doubt I will use this personally - but I will also see how it plays out.
• Choose your own thumbnail sizes.You can now set the size of your thumbnails (small and medium size options). This setting is under "Miscellaneous".
• Prototype library has been updated to version 1.6. If you are using any custom plugins that use Prototype or any custom template code that rely on Prototype - you might experience some issues if you are using an older version. Make sure everything you use is up to date. (I ran into this issue personally)
• Gravatar functionality is now part of WordPress - no more plugins needed. Here is a quick way to implelement gravatar support in WordPress 2.5+ comments: In your comments.php file you can add in gravatar functionality by simply adding:
  PLAIN TEXT
  PHP:

  1. <?php if(function_exists('get_avatar')){ echo get_avatar($comment, '40');} ?>

  before :

  PLAIN TEXT
  PHP:

  1. <?php comment_text() ?>

  That is it! You could also add gravatars to posts by putting the same code into the post loop to have the gravatar show per post author. (The number - in this example 40 - is the size of the gravatar)

Make sure you check out the screencast that Matt created which highlights the new 2.5 features.

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.

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.