When I first loaded WordPress 25RC1 a couple of weeks ago, I wasn’t that impressed with what I saw.

Possibly it was because the revised layout meant that I would have to redo a lot of my documentation.
But there were things that were initially a bit irritating - but now they’re growing on me.
For some strange reason the Post area is set to a maxium of 980px, and it sits to the left - so you have WordPress only using some of your screen. Quite easy to fix if you just tweak two CSS settings - so I’ve got rid of at least one annoyance.

The one that I’m not sure I agree with is the moving of the Categories list from the RHS of the post area to ‘below the fold’. I’ve found it easy enough in the past to leave the post allocated to the default category - so having tge Categories list out of site is possibly going to catch out more people that it did in the past.

Ok - those are the two things that I noticed straight away. I then played with the widgets, and saw that the Widgets page had been significantly changed. It is an improvement. The previous versions of WordPress used to create multiple versions of multi-instance widgets, and display them in the Widget’s ‘pool’ below the sidebars. If you had many multi-instance widgets, this area could look quite messy - so the new format is neater, and having a short description per widget should help newbies understand WordPress that much quicker.

The bad news for me, of course, was that the revised widget format meant that my Rapid Niche Websites widgets all needed to be updated. I include a number of these with the RNW System, so this was not a trivial task. Several hours after starting, I’m relieved that I’ve killed that part of the conversion. I now need to work on several plugins that used to hook into the WYSIWG editor - and which now no longer work. No doubt another long session before I can check that task off my list… And when the technology is fixed, my documentation is going to need to be revised …

A coupld of good improvements :

• Speed - the new version certainly is much faster on the test site that I am doing my conversion on.
• The WYSIWYG editor no longer scrambles my embedded DIV tags. Prior versions used to convert any DIV tags into P tags. This very irritating flaw has been sorted out - so it is now possible to use the WYSIWYG editor, and then easily flip to the HTML source - add in a couple of DIV tags, and then revert back to the WYSIWYG mode - without the code being broken. This is really going to help a lot of WordPress users who’ve been unable to quickly insert a positioning DIV tag in a Post due to the former over-zealous code cleanup routines.

So - despite my initial negative impression, I am starting to enjoy the new version. It’s editing behaviour is more predictable, the widgets section is smarter, and the system is faster.

Well done to Matt and his team for once again improving on an already good product.