WordPress 2.0 is out today, and to commemorate this momentous occasion I thought it would be a good idea for some quick first impressions. I’ve been playing around with various betas and release candidates for a while now but this is my first experience with the finished article.

There weren’t any major bugs to fix with the 1.5 line, so this is just a good opportunity to create new ones by adding a lot of new functionality, both obvious stuff and a lot of tweaking behind the scenes. If all goes according to plan you shouldn’t even notice the change as, for the moment at least, all the changes are on my end. You might get a little speed increase from the new caching system, but that’s about it.

The admin pages are now a fetching shade of teal (I prefer the old white/grey but it’s acceptable) and probably the most noticable addition is a TinyMCE WSIWYG editor for writing posts. I turned it off because I like to control my HTML, but it should help make WordPress more accessible to people who just want to be able to blog without getting their hands dirty. Other changes are fairly superficial (I like the screenshots for theme selection) but we’ll see the benefits when developers start taking advantage of the upgrades. The upgrade was as painless as always, and my theme and all plugins worked fine once I’d grabbed a couple of newer versions.

A couple of bugs regarding timestamps that I’d run into when I was running RC3 locally have been mostly fixed and so far no problems at all. It always impresses me when open source software can be this robust while costing nothing, and this example comes highly recommended.