The next major release of WordPress, version 2.5, is almost here. A release date of March 10th is scheduled and the developers have decided to put the development on feature freeze as they focus more on bug hunting and polishing the features and code already in there. Chris Johnston was also generous enough to host a demo site, but was abused and hacked to redirect to some other site. The link to the demo site was removed from WLTC and The WordPress Podcast. Ryan has it though, but it might be gone soon, so if you want to see what the new Administration area looks like, head on over to his blog and look for it in the Comments section. I tried logging in and I checked out the new design, and honestly, I didn't expect to see the new colors, given that the new colors are mostly in the same range as the colors here. The new design is refreshing, and quite a big step away from the hues of blues in the current (almost previous) versions. The Dashboard is more organized, and the whole Administration area is restructured to give more focus on what a blogger would do rather than be suggestive of what should be done. Besides the colors of the Administration area changing, another feature that caught my attention is when I went to the Manage tab. There's now an option to manage tags. This is a feature that, at first, was not really planned and will not be put in core, leaving tag management to plugin developers. One too many cherries on top of the begging and pleading and it was decided to put it in core. At least, that's how I think it went. Anyway, the tag management page looks a lot like the category management page. Let's just see if this scales with a thousand tags to manage. Hopefully, it will. And gracefully, as it does. All in all, having been able to test-drive WordPress 2.5 only whets my appetite even more and I can't wait for March 10th. A new look to the Administration area is one of the things the developers did right. I just hope everything else is also the same.