WordPress 3.5 Elvin Drums Along Open Source CMS

From the ‘Open Source CMS that Rules Them All’ files:

That’s right I called WordPress a CMS (Content Management System) and not a blogging platform. With WordPress 3.5, officially released on Tuesday, the CMS moves forward with some incremental features.

I’m a user of both self-hosted as well WordPress.com sites so I’ve noticed some of the WordPress 3.5 changes roll out over the last several weeks. WordPress tends to dogfood releases on the hosted WordPress.com platform first before making the full release generally available.

The most obvious new item in WordPress 3.5 is the image uploading feature which has been dramatically improved. Instead of going through three or more clicks to upload media, it’s now a one click drag and drop type of operation. Even something as basic as creating image captions (which we’ve long been able to do with WordPress) is now easier because it’s all part of the flow.

The initial welcome screen as well as the user dashboard also gets a refresh in this update, though that seems to be an area that WordPress updates with every update (right?)

For those that like to use WordPress to host multiple sites with one engine (multisite), WordPress 3.5 is a huge change too.

For the first time multisite installs can be installed with WordPress in a subdirectory. Might sound like a small thing, but I gotta tell ya, it has been a major pain for many people (myself included). Multisite first landed in WordPress core with the WordPress 3.0 releasein 2010 so this fix is two years in the making.

Sean Michael Kerner is a senior editor at InternetNews.com, the news service of the IT Business Edge Network, the network for technology professionals Follow him on Twitter @TechJournalist.