WordPress 2.5 is out (and the WordPress site got a facelift), and I’ve already upgraded MaisonBisson using SVN. The changes are exciting, and seem to reflect a tradition that’s developing in WordPress of delivering some really revolutionary features in the x.5 release.
The loss of file-based object caching was a bit of a problem, as my VPS‘s load average jumped to over 30 pretty quickly after the upgrade. I tried Mark Jaquith‘s apc-object-cache enabler and saw load average drop back to 2 or so, but I also saw tag and category names disappear and discovered other weirdness. Why it happened I don’t know, but I’m looking into it. Fortunately, NeoSmart‘s file-based object cache replacement works perfectly and efficiently. (Mind you, Ryan Boren thinks WordPress caches should require more adventure.)
bSuite seems to work perfectly in 2.5, though the new shortcode API obviates one of bSuite’s coolest features: tokens. Still, it’s better to run with the herd, so I’ll be transitioning bSuite’s built in tokens to take advantage of the shortcode API soon.
One of the features that’s not received much attention yet, but is hugely valuable to those (like me) who are using and advocating for WordPress as a general purpose CMS, is the concurrent editing protection. That is, if another WordPress author is editing a story, you can’t save changes to it until that editor is done. The next step for this is to allow concurrent team editing in the way Google Docs does as well as versioning (versioning has been discussed as a feature for 2.6).