Early adopters, rejoice! WordPress 2.5RC1 is available for you to download and play with.

Matt Mullenweg posted that the "sneak peek" was ready this morning, there were quickly over 40 pingbacks on the story, in several languages. It seems WordPress users have been waiting for this day like kids on Christmas Eve. If there was any doubt what personal publishing platform is the hottest right now, that kind of reaction would seem to have settled it.

Matt's post includes screenshots of several of the updated components including the dashboard, and describes other changes they've made to simplify navigation of the administration functions. It looks great, and I'm going to have to try it out myself. I used WordPress for a short-lived test blog I was writing last fall, and while I found the setup very simple when compared to other CMS offerings, I decided that Drupal was more suited to the type of additional content I was planning to add.

You can download WordPress 2.5RC1 here. The link is near the bottom of Matt's post.