On the last day of 2005, WordPress 2.0 dropped. I believe I actually installed it a couple days before that. I was at home, in Chipmonk, and I had some free time on my hands. It was risky, considering that I was working with a dial-up connection and I often experience zero-notification incomplete FTP uploads, but I was in little A-Town, and I was antsy.

First of all, the dashboard UI is very blue. I like it. It’s flavor where before there was none. I’m a little surprised that there is no option to at least make everything red or green or purple.

The post editor is done up in AJAX now. Before it was pretty simplistic — it offered tools for creating links and basic formatting. The old version also showed you the raw HTML. Now it’s more along the lines of the finished product. Additionally — and this is pretty awesome — the post preview now actually renders the post with your current theme. So you really see exactly what the post will look like. Thumbs up.

Unfortunately, this new editor interface doesn’t work with Google Toolbar’s Spellchecker. I might do a post to show what I mean.

The file upload interface is now a part of the post editor. This works for me.

There are also changes to the user priveleges system, which bores me.

The last thing that really catches my eye is an improved — or at least more visible — import system. I think this might interest someone like Lewis, who has years of content stacked up. The only thing is, WP2’s Import tool supports a pretty narrow range of formats. Still, one of these is RSS, and I think Lewis has the hook up for that. In a worst case scenario, one could write a script to parse the old stuff and make it suitable for import. Hell, that even sounds fun. I would have liked to do it for the posts I had from before I moved to WordPress. Too bad I already imported all of them manually.

So overall I call WP2 an improvement. I think I feel good knowing that at least some work is being done on the product.