Yes, I know I’m a couple days on this story, like my last news story. Anyway, the release WordPress 2.5 has been hyped up for a while now. Being scheduled, postponed, rescheduled, and postponed some more. Matt from WordPress recently announced the release of WordPress 2.5 RC1 on the WordPress development blog. There have been a lot of layout changes to the admin panel, focusing more emphasis on common tasks (like writing) and less emphasis on menial tasks such as activating plugins. WordPress 2.3.3 is still the latest stable release. If you want to try it out for yourself I’d recommend it be installed locally or an otherwise “non production” blog.

In case you were wondering, RC stands for release candidate. This basically means it isn’t an officially “stable” release yet, although it will probably work okay. The purpose of releasing this version first is to work out any last few bugs that may be present before the final 2.5 release. This is why it’s probably a good idea to stick with 2.3.3 until then.