I’ve been testing the plugin upgrade functionality, and I have to say that it works just fine.  I’ve upgraded 5 sites to WordPress 2.5 in the last hour and upgraded every plugin that needed it.  No problems here.

I’ll be going through my themes to make sure that all everything works ok, but so far on my test server, there doesn’t seem to be any issues.

If you haven’t upgraded yet, then head on over to WordPress.org and do so.  You won’t regret it.

I made a comment on the post that, after further reflection, I’d like to expand on here.

It is my opinion that the new default theme would need to embrace the newbies and intermediate users who are looking at WordPress as not only a blogging platform and CMS, but also as an outlet for their creativity and passion.

The question is: “How can we achieve that?”

Using Ian’s suggestion of using The Sandbox, which is a really great theme from a design and coding perspective, we could expand the choices of a default theme by including a theme options page that would allow the user to choose from a pre-determined selection of templates and layouts, with options to change the default header, page layout, number of sidebars, sidebar locations, footer, footer layout, etc.

If the theme options page has the ability to change not only the look, but also the feel and functionality of the site, there would be far more interest in creating templates for The Sandbox. But, once again, if there are too many options to choose from, the newbie/intermediate user may just decide that it’s too difficult.

It’s a challenge, that’s for sure. I can’t wait to see what happens with this contest.