Page 5: WordPress 2.5 Managing Content
When I clicked on the “Manage” link in the dashboard I saw distinct changes right away. First is the addition of the checkboxes beside posts, so you can checkoff and delete multiple posts at once if you so choose. In addition is the “status” column to the right so you can see if a post is published or draft. The “tags” and “categories” columns are new as well. Now you can just click items to go to them, like clicking the post title takes you to “edit”. Clicking the author, tag, or category takes you directly to them. The “published / draft” dropdown has been split into links above the table now. The comment column now has a little bubble with comment counts, this was already available in 2.3.3, so only the display has improved.
Managing pages is pretty much the same, except you can view “published” and “private”, but “drafts” has been removed as a sort option:
The top level dashboard pick “Blogroll” has now been moved under “Manage” and it’s been renamed to “Links”. I didn’t see any changes to “Blogroll” other than the fact that the name blogroll has been updated to “Links”.
Manage categories also has the nice addition of the ability to bulk delete with a newly added checkbox:
Many of you will love the fact that there’s now a “Manage Tags” pages. In WordPress 2.3x we saw tags introduced for the first time, but there was no way to manage them at all. The only way to do this was to scavange a plugin from the web somewhere. Now, you can manage tags just like categories.
I never used this feature, but a lot of people used to go to “Manage -> Upload” to upload content to their blog (images and media) to use in posts. The upload tab is gone now, because it’s available (only) directly on the “Write” pages, and it’s been replaced with “Manage -> Media Library”, which for the first time allows WordPress bloggers to manage, delete, and find media they’ve uploaded to their blog.
My day job is a Test Engineer so I don’t trust developers =)~ . I personally would like to see how my blog fares with major releases by creating a copy of my production blog into a test site and upgrade that test site to WordPress 2.5.
After upgrading, I found out first hand that I had a problem with easy gravatars, lazyest gallery, popularity contest, link harvester, and my own NowThen Photo Display plugin. So many things broke at once. Luckily I was also able debug and fix my blog in the background without visitors seeing all the issues.
I’ve outline the necessary steps to create a test blog here.
It’s totally worth it if you have many visitors to your site.
Thaya Kareesons last blog post..Make WP-PostViews Work with WP-Super-Cache
I usually install all the updates on my local machine and tests all the plugins. When I am satisfied with all of the related themes and plugins, I copy all the files to to my live server.
I upgraded to 2.5 and it is working perfectly right for me.
Shafiq Rehmans last blog post..TP-LINK TD-W8920G Wireless ADSL2 Router Review
Nice post….:)
But Instead of doing manual upgradation i recommend to use Automatic Upgrade plugin (http://wordpress.org/extend/plugins/wordpress-automatic-upgrade/)….:D
it’s very easy to use ….and i does all the pre and post upgrade tasks…
I upgraded one of my blog using it and it took me just 1 minute to do upgradation 😀
That’s a popular plugin, but one that I would never recommend for most people. You have to check the compatible plugin list every time before upgrading, just to be sure you don’t have a big conflict. If that plugin could do an automatic check of that list before upgrading, I might think about it. For now, the safest way to upgrade is manually…
I would also suggest downloading the xampplite package. It is basically a no install apache / mysql self setup local website.
This gives you the luxury of running your own local copy of your website, so you can test upgrades or code changes locally before uploading for the world to see.
Tarkan
I really like the local testing idea! I might give that a shot one of these days.