Photo courtesy of Eurovision TV

The Beta 1 version of WordPress 2.8 was released last night (in the middle of the Eurovision Song Content - what were they thinking of?!). I'm now testing it in a couple of places, and it has some lovely new features:

1. The theme installer is probably the headline for most people. New themes, like plugins, can now be installed from within the WordPress dashboard rather than via FTP.
2. The Widgets page has been overhauled, and looks much nicer. There's a useful feature to save "inactive" widgets: they'll no longer show up on your blog, but all settings will be saved, so it'll be easier to play around with widgets til you have your sidebars looking like you want them.
3. Syntax highlighting, line numbering and function documentation lookup have been added to the plugin and theme editors. This is cute, but personally I'd like the option to turn it off: the syntax highlighting is a bit laggy.
4. All plugin files can now be edited from within admin.
5. WP will no longer ask for confirmation when you mark something as spam.
6. "Tag suggest" (the pop-up that shows you tags you've used before) now works on Quick Edit and Bulk Edit: very useful to ensure you're consistent with tag usage. And tags can now have descriptions added; use tag_description to access them.
7. wp_tag_cloud has been expanded, so that tag clouds can now include post categories as well as tags.
8. Authors will no longer receive email notification of their own comments (hurrah!).
9. When registering new users, there's now the option to "Send this password to the new user by email."
10. Links can now be "rated" and sorted by rating - useful if you want a custom arrangement, or just to put your favourites at the top of the list.
11. Hitting control/command+S will now autosave a draft post or page. (This isn't working here, but it's quite possibly just me...)
12. The Dashboard can now be arranged in 4 columns. This could be a useful feature.... "I need a wider screen because - look! - my WP dashboard is all squished up on this one".

The full list of new features is available in the Codex.

Should I upgrade?

Not yet - wait for the final release version. If you're running WordPress 2.7 or 2.7.1, wait until you see the "there's a newer version, you need to upgrade" button appear on your dashboard, and then click it. If you're using an older version (you bad, bad person ) then you can probably wait a couple of weeks for the final version of 2.8, though strictly speaking you should upgrade to 2.7.1 now.

Tags: 2.8, new release

Posted by Sue on May 17, 2009 in WordPress.