It’s exciting times in the WordPress world! The release of WordPress 2.7 with its cool new features and improvements just feels like yesterday. My WordPress 2.7 resources post is still popular in the search engines!
And WordPress 2.8 beta 1 has been released! So, I grabbed a copy of it and installed it to take a look at what’s in store for us.
WordPress 2.8 New Features
WordPress lovers, we have a ton of new features/improvements although a lot of them subtle. I’ll try to highlight a few that I loved to see. You can read the complete list at the WordPress blog linked at the bottom.
User Features
- Improved Admin icons
- Search/Install new Plugins/Themes from Admin
- Theme editor gets syntax highlighting
- Upto four columns for Dashboard widgets
- Post via e-mail – just set up an email account with POP3 access and go!
- Auto-save post/page with Ctrl+S
- Description field for tags
- Setting timezone made easy – choose a city in your timezone
Developer/Tech Features
- Improved database performance
- Using SimplePie for widget and dashboard feeds
- Using TinyMCE 3.2.3
- Better script loading performance
- Enhanced support for custom taxonomies
- Proxy support via wp-config.php – great for Intranet WordPress installs to get updates to plugins, themes, etc
- jQuery 1.3.2 with minify support
- New Widgets API
- Menu reordering via Plugin
WordPress is looking better than ever with 2.8! It’s great to see the community involvement and the fast release cycle. With the easy auto-update feature in WordPress 2.7+, I like the fast development cycle better than ever.
Great write-up! Can’t wait to try out the new features myself! Why did you stop using DoFollow or KeyWordLuv?
Cheers!
Brian J Kings last blog post..My KIWI Communications LLC Business Card got us Free Chipotle lunch!
Post via e-mail- sweet!
Thanks Brian! I went into great detail here on why I discontinued being a dofollow blog.
I want to see some upgrades from current 2.7.1 first. Especially with the new widget API, I am sure it is backwards compatible, but who wants to be the brave one to test it out before going live? I guess the smart thing to do would be to set it up in a test environment. Just back up your current database and restore it into a new one for the 2.8 testing.
Zacs last blog post..Putting A Dog In The Washer
hey,
thanks for this very good post! its amazing how fast this release is developed!
greetings from germany
thanks. it is very informative for the new users like me. thanks again.
Looking forward to this update. I was quite happy with the performance updates in 2.7 and more are always welcome. I am curious to know if anything stands out as a huge improvement in this release.
I am looking forward to getting my teeth stuck into and testing some themes on WP2.8!
Premium WordPress Themess last blog post..WordPress 2.8 To Be Released May
The features look cool et all but in the past, I’ve learnt the hard way that a beta edition will never match up to a final release version… So I’ll just wait.
And hey, cool blog.
5ives last blog post..The magic numbers
Wow, I like the post via email feature. It’s going to be great being able to post from my desktop using Outlook as opposed to having to login to WordPress. That was a change I didn’t expect.