Finally, yesterday I decided to update my old cms WordPress 2.3, and install the new WordPress 2.5. I personally like the way that WordPress is laid out. The new release changes the entire look of the dashboard WordPress administration area.

But the WordPress 2.5 has been significantly enhanced with key advantages in the area of Widget-Based Dashboard, Tag Management, and Built-in avatar support. To summarize the key features of this platform, check out below:

Photo credit: Otsukare

New Admin Interface. The WordPress interface is its greates asset and it is evident that a lot of time and care has been put into making it as accessible and intuitive. There are yes a lot of other buttons and functions.

• Widget-Based Dashboard. You should be able to have any number of any widget
• Built-in avatar support. The avatar support in 2.5 does not attempt to add avatars into your existing themes.
• Tag Management. It works like Flickr tags where tags can be added via a list of comma separated tags or via a “type, click, add” mantra.
• Plugin Auto-upgrade. The system will try to upgrade plugins that are already in the WordPress plugin repository by writing the new files out to the existing plugins.

How Does To Update To WordPress 2.5

The upgrade from WordPress 2.3 to 2.5 went smoothly for me. With these, tips suggested here, you can start immediately to update your wrdpress platform to the new version.

WordPress Database Backup. I recommend you to make a backup of your blog or website. The best way to do it is to install a WordPress plugin and not by using phpMyAdmin, I’m using WordPress Database Backup 1.7. It’s very hard to use for no expert.

Download WordPress 2.5. All you need to do is point your browser on “WordPress.org” and download the latest copy of WordPress 2.5. Once de-compressed the zip file and extracts the folder to your desktop. Note. First to make the following operations, check up that all your plugins are compatible with WordPress 2.5 and disactive it.

Upload Folders And Files. Open the folder called “WordPress”, there are some files and folders you must copy on your directory of your website where your blog is installed. Ok, make attention! Login to your website using FTP(I’m personally using Filezilla) and upload on your root directory the following folders and files.

• Folders: Admin and includes.
• Files: Index.php, xmlrpc.php, wp-trackback.php, etc.

From your root directory don’t touch the follow folder and files:

• Folders: Wp-content (It contains your themes and plugins).
• Files: Wp-config.php, .htaccess, robots.txt, sitemap, etc.

Check Up

Now point your browser to “www.my-site-url.com/wp-admin/upgrade.php”. For example, if your site is www.mysite.com, than digits “www.mysite.com/wp-admin/upgrade” and automatically access to the wordpress upgrade page. Once upgraded you can re-activate the plugins. Below, is a short list of plug-ins that I presonalmente tested and that they work:

• All in One SEO Pack. Out-of-the-box SEO for your WordPress blog.
• Auto Social.. Automatic post tagging with delicio.us and the like.
• Blog Metrics Provides blog metrics based on the blog metrics Avinash Kaushik proposed in this post.
• Comment Relish. Increases your readership and RSS subscription rate by simply sending a short ‘thank you’ relishing type message to users when they first comment on your weblog.
• Crawl Rate Tracker. This is a plugin to log every visit by search engine robots, and show the results in different reports.
• Defensio Anti-Spam. Defensio is an advanced spam filtering web service that learns and adapts to your behaviors and those of your readers. To use this plugin, you need to obtain a free API Key. Tell the world how many spam Defensio caught! Just put in your template.
• EmbedIt. A simple plugin that allows you to embed any HTML code (Youtube, UStream or whatever) in a post.
• FeedBurner FeedSmith. Originally authored by Steve Smith, this plugin detects all ways to access your original WordPress feeds and redirects them to your FeedBurner feed so you can track every possible subscriber.
• reCAPTCHA. Integrates a reCAPTCHA with wordpress.
• Twitter Tools. A complete integration between your WordPress blog and Twitter. Bring your tweets into your blog and pass your blog posts to Twitter.