A quick Monday note to mention a recent project I’m quite excited about. WordPress fans may already know that the redesign of the administration panel has been talked about for some time. Well, this weekend saw the release of WordPress 2.5, which included improvements far and wide, including the redesign of the admin.
I’m honored to have been a small part of its redesign. WordPress approached Happy Cog to streamline WordPress’ information architecture and design. We worked with the valliant Matt Mullenweg, who in turn gathered feedback from the team at Auttomatic, while we developed a new structural and design system.
And our redesign was just the beginning. Once the design was complete, the developer community stepped in to continue. The release of 2.5 was truly an open project in that there were nearly 100 people involved. According to Matt in his announcement post, “… in our core code, not plugins, there were at least 90 individual folks that contributed something high-quality enough that it made the cut to be part of the download you guys get today.”
You can see download WordPress 2.5 yourself or watch a preview of 2.5 in action. While the changes from the last release are quite extensive, they’re just the beginning of a long iterative process. So if you have ideas or feedback on how it can improve, WordPress is always interested in hearing them.
I’ve been so impressed with every aspect of working with Auttomatic and the rest of the developer community. Mike Adams, Ryan Boren, Andy Skelton, Matt Thomas, and many, many more made this a truly enjoyable process. I hope you enjoy using it!
