I am really excited about the new Word­press 2.5 update! It promises to make me a more pro­fi­cient blog­ger with a com­pletely new look. On the down­side of this is what secu­rity releases will be gen­er­ated after­ward and which plug-in will not func­tion. Hope­fully, every­thing will work fine but you know the drill, back it up first. I find word­press updates a nec­es­sary evil: you have to do it but hate to do it. Here is a high­lighted fea­ture list (par­tial list):

1. Dash­board sports a col­or­ful new look with rel­e­vant infor­ma­tion per­tain­ing to recent com­ments, incom­ing links, stats, news and upcom­ing blog posts.
2. Nav­i­ga­tion –User friendly inter­face to access info quickly with write, man­age, design and com­ments as pri­mary func­tions.
3. The “Write screen” high­lights fea­tures used most often with a full screen mode to help you focus on your writ­ing (I do most of my writ­ing in Microsoft word)

An early release is avail­able for those adven­ture­some peo­ple who want to pro­vide feed­back to the word­press community.