I’ve just been reading a glowing review of Wordpress 1.5 Gamma by Mark . I can’t wait until it makes Beta and is released…
Here are some of the new additions that had me jumping for joy:
- The Dashboard: Everytime you log into your blog to post, you are greeted with the dashboard which gives you a quick glance into some small stats for your blog and recent Wordpress news. I am quite proud since Wordpress Planet made its way into the code. I like having a short summary of recent posts, comments and total numbers. I think Jesuit (Chris Davis) was the first to come up with this idea and I think it is very useful and very elegant.
- Write Post, Write Page: If you are not aware already, Wordpress 1.5 allows you to build static pages such as a Colophon and link them directly from within your blog which is very nice. Write Page is quite flexible. You can create a page with any of the usable templates to make it suit the page you are creating. I will probably end up building a “Links” page for the new blog. Easy, usable, friendly and quite enticing.
- The Options: Now thats gotten quite a few new features. I like the default post category dropdown, the ability to control postings from new users by forcing them to be drafts.
- Spam prevention: 1.5 incorporates a very clever set of rules to reduce spam. Simply put, not only do you have a list of words that can trigger a comment moderation, certain words can be made to kill spam on contact. I know this is going to be a bad example, but it reminds me of marine Lionfish. Certain varieties of Lionfish can seriously injure and kill a human being on contact with their dorsal spines while others will produce just a mild sting. So if a word appears in the blacklist and is seen in a comment, the comment is history. Works for Photomatt.
- Themes: Wow. This is where Wordpress has really surprised and impressed me. I am a coder and not a designer. However, CSS and XHTML can be daunting. Michael and Kubrick are incredibly easy to work with on the contrary. Installation of themes are a breeze. Just upload to the right folder and select the theme! Set the right permissions and you can even edit the text online.