Second, there has to be some rule against critiquing an application without formally using it. (I must admit that I’ve violated that rule plenty of times).

I had some dissent about phpBB3, way back when it was in alpha, but was impressed by what the final result was and when I played around with it.

I think users should embrace change, so the ‘cheese’ has moved. I suggest you move with it or at least change it.

When I first looked at the demo installation that some guy put up, I thought it looked horrible. Way too much padding everywhere, etc. The extranous padding was actually an outstanding ticket in the WordPress development tracker, and has been worked on (and will be tidied up before final release I’m sure).

I’ve installed RC2 and to me the interface is fine. The colour scheme is actually very pleasant after using it for a bit, and I think it was my typically human knee-jerk reaction to change that made me look at it so negatively.

Everything really is laid out a lot better now from a usability perspective. I’ve just built a whole bunch of pages and posts (pages are particularly easier to manage now), and it was a lot easier than with the old interface.

My favourite thing is the way that the stuff is hidden until you activate it for that post, brought in via AJAX when you click ‘edit’ next to the post slug for example.

My concluded opinion: the new interface is a step forward and people will grow to appreciate it once their initial shock and horror passes. :)

Yes to be honest there must be few tweeks to be done here and there but overall I like it better then 2.0 .
It all depends on what kind of wp blog you are running. Bloggers that don’t use media in blog posts I think its not that important, but for someone like me I think multi-media option is the key of blog posting in wp 2.5 :)

~Sincerely,
~LC.

I installed wordpress 2.5 a few days ago on my test server to check if my technorati links plugin was needed anymore. The plugin apparently is no longer needed, so I wrote up a quick post about changing the incoming links feed to technorati.

I love WordPress too, but I’d love it to be more efficient, like Textpattern. There’s a considerable difference between the two when you compare how much more bandwidth is chewed by WordPress.