The world is eagerly awaiting the release of WordPress 2.5, the OpenSource blogging platform I’ve been using for over three years.

When I first installed WordPress, I was sold primarily on the advantages of hosting everything on my own server space, and hence retaining much closer control of it, and on the advantage of using PHP over the old static HTML solution Blogger was providing at that time. I was so enthused by the change that I happily manually imported my posts over from both MoveableType and Blogger, which I’d been using previously.

WordPress has come a very long way since then, with automated out-of-the-box importing from other blogging platforms, and very much more besides. Yet, whilst being immensely more powerful, it’s still simple enough for me to customise to my very particular needs, from using fourteen plugins (mostly modified in their own right) to a completely custom theme, and even some changes to the WordPress engine itself.

A couple of years ago, when WordPress turned three years old, I wrote a comparison of the different blogging platforms I’d previously used. Any such comparison I could attempt to write now would be even more hopelessly out of date than that one was, and so I’m not going to try to repeat the exercise. I would, however, like to register my utter disbelief at the fact that I wrote that piece two years ago – it feels more like two weeks. And to think that I can get away with using the same image – that the backend of WordPress has been in what still feels like ‘shiny new’ mode for well over two years – is even more frightening.

However, I know that I’m incredibly loyal to WordPress. From its community full of incredibly helpful and friendly developers, to the way it just gets on and *does* most of the things I want it to do, WordPress simply sells itself to me through its everyday use.

With the launch of WordPress 2.5, the final few of my personal bugs about WordPress will be fixed, and that still-shiny interface is to be updated to something presumably even more radiant. Upgrades to software plugins will, we’re told, become ‘one-click’, removing possibly the final hurdle which prevents people from setting up WordPress on their own (as opposed to using the relatively new hosted solution, WordPress.com). Image galleries will be built-in. And importantly for you, dear readers, load times should be faster.

I guess what I’m struggling to articulate is that I’m proud to use WordPress, I’m happy to support it, and would happily recommend it to anyone. Long may it continue to develop, to version 2.5 and beyond!

» Image Credit: ‘Backstage’ image by SJ Howard, originally published here.