Personal Branding Blog – Dan Schawbel

I typically don’t post more than once a day unless I feel I have no other option. WordPress 2.5 is officially out, which means people who are using WordPress.org and hosting it on their own domain must download the new version, while we WordPress.com‘ers have it automatically switched, without losing information. The improvements in 2.5 are numerous, and it took the collective feedback of the entire WordPress community to built the new look and feel.  Matt Mullenweg, in my opinion, is not only one of the smartest people I’ve ever spoken with, but his brand is righteous and honest. I interviewed him for the 3rd issue of Personal Branding Magazine, if you remember. There is still time to get the sample issue before it is replaced by issue 4, which debuts in 2 weeks.  I wanted to quickly discuss the new features, how WordPress is doing and my opinion on the update.  Have a great weekend everyone!

Here is a list of new features:

• Appeal - Cleaner, faster, less cluttered dashboard
• Dashboard widgets – customize your widgets to display the news and stats that you want
• Multi-file upload with progress bar – select many multimedia elements and watch the progress of the upload (with 3 GB of space)
• Search posts and pages
• Tag management – add, rename, delete tags from inside WordPress
• Concurrent editing protection – it now automatically locks a post that someone is editing
• Friendlier visual post editor – the code works now
• Built-in galleries – you can now embed photo galleries if you upload many photos at once

Why WordPress is the best (March Stats)

• 298,194 blogs were created.
• 381,855 new users joined.
• 2,242,997 file uploads.
• 3,225,059 posts and 1,420,975 new pages.
• 5,622,696 comments.
• 4,418,407 logins.

My opinion

My favorite feature is that you can add any type of multimedia content to your post with ease. This includes images, video, and audio. For video, you can choose between Flash, Quicktime, Shockwave, Windows Media and Real Media. You can also set options for this embedded media, such as the quality, scale and alignment, which you certainly couldn’t maneuver before. I think the new color scheme was a mistake though because it’s too bright and it’s hard to see everything. The Dashboard is somewhat cluttered now, but it was a tradeoff to have more options and customization. I’m really excited that Matt and his team are putting this much effort into a free service, so everyone in the world can have their very own blog, at minimal cost and with almost no technical expertise.

What do you think about the new WordPress?