WordPress 2.5 has been officially released! 
Rejoice, oh blogging masses!
As I stated in an earlier post (while alpha-testing the software) this is a major software upgrade with a gazillion improvements. As with any massive change there will be some broken WordPress themes and plugins to fix… but the sunshine on the horizon is nearly blinding. I really can’t wait to dive in on this release and start developing websites. I think the huge upgrades to the design and operation of the administration interface is paramount to customer adoption and usability (every developer knows that user self-sustainability cannot be over-stated, period).
And if the new release wasn’t enough, the WordPress website itself just got a sweet redesign too! Very nice, Matt!
From Matt Mullenweg‘s official announcement:
WordPress 2.5, the culmination of six months of work by the WordPress community, people just like you. The improvements in 2.5 are numerous, and almost entirely a result of your feedback: multi-file uploading, one-click plugin upgrades, built-in galleries, customizable dashboard, salted passwords and cookie encryption, media library, a WYSIWYG that doesn’t mess with your code, concurrent post editing protection, full-screen writing, and search that covers posts and pages.
Here are some stats from Peter Westwood that he just posted about:
WordPress 2.5 has been released and includes a huge number of changes over the WordPress 2.3 series. Rather than list the changes in detail which would probably take me some days to write out I offer the following statistics and information about the WordPress 2.5 release:
- In development for 185 days (6 months 3 days to be precise).
- Changes to 364 files with 54008 insertions, and 29136 deletions for more detail you can view the diffstat output.
- Patches committed from over 110 different contributors.
- Over 1300 individual changes made for more detail you can view a complete changelog.