Upgraded my sandbox to Wordpress 2.5, and it gets a big fat fail. Won’t be upgrading my main site and am now sorry I upgraded my sandbox, as I will now have to totally reinstall Wordpress there.

First major complaint? On the Post Write page, the selection boxes for categories, post slug, post password, date stamp, etc. were all on a sidebar beside the post box right at hand AND I could drag and drop them around to decide in what order I wanted them to appear by how often I needed them. No more! In 2.5 they are all under the post box, the order can’t apparently be changed, and that means having to scroll, and scroll, and scroll to get to everything. This was the automatic fail for me. It is a loss of previous good functionality.

But, if the new gallery feature worked for me as advertised, I could possible overlook the gosh awful posting page layout. I eagerly tried it. I got an error message, and it will only upload one image at a time for me. I looked to see if there was a fix for it, and there is. It involves disabling some security using the htaccess file. Oh sure, the automatic gallery creation in posts is very cool, but I’m not going to be disabling any security features on my server space, thank you very much. Another fail.

I didn’t even look at it any further than these two things. No point, since I already knew there was no way in hell I was going to upgrade at this point. I did read a few reviews and some threads at the user forums, and from what I can tell, there are even more things I wouldn’t like anyway.

Oh, and the Dashboard is now a cluttered, slow-loading mess of crap I do not need to see every time I go to the admin area. That I could have probably overlooked had everything else been awesome, but everything else was not awesome. Therefore, 2.3 will continue to be my chosen version. Hopefully the next version of WP will fix the nastiness. If not, I may be forced to seek new software. I’d hate that, but since I am planning to overhaul the whole web site, now would be the time to consider such a move and not after I have thousands of posts (like I do right now).

Just … grrrr. I really wanted it to work and be awesome.