WordPress has released their latest a much faster and cooler version of it popular blogging platform. So after getting a lot of people excited with its 2.7 release WP 2.8 is now available for download and has packed in a lot more user friendliness than before. According to WordPress – version 2.8 represents a nice fit and finish release for WordPress with improvements to themes, widgets, taxonomies, and overall speed.
The Beta release of this version happened around this time last month and had been getting a lot of positive response. While the sucessors to ver 2.8 are already in the works with an integration of WordPress MU and WordPress on the cards now that Buddypress is live.
So what is new here?
Apparently lots of stuff. There are close to 180 upgrades, changes, options and improvements in the core WP codex. And almost 170 bug fixes from the preious version which was 2.7.1. WordPress had gained considerable ground in usability and design with WP 2.7 so the overall admin interface still remains the same ..superficially.
Some of the major changes that I noted include:
- New Theme Installer routines
- Add CodePress syntax highlighting to Theme and Plugin editors
- Make tags accessible without Javascript on the edit screen
- Improved Widget user interface
- Support more than one gallery on the same page
- Overhaul of LiveJournal importer
The major part of the upgrade are basically three. Firstly, WordPress will be faster thanks to script compression and concatenation in the admin section. The other 2 basically improve usability in terms of site design and maintenance i.e Themes and Widgets management.
You can now browse the entire theme directory and install a theme with one click from the comfort of your WordPress dashboard. This was a feature introduced for plugins in the last major upgrade and is now available for themes. For those bloggers who are mad about changing their blog’s looks more often than content this is mighty useful. The third of course is better widget management -you can now edit widgets on the fly, have multiple copies of the same widget, drag and drop widgets between sidebars, etc.
Now why did I name the title of the post Out comes Baker?
Well that’s what WP has named this release – Baker, which is a dedication to the famed jazz musician Chet Baker. I guess the deidcation in part goes to the jazzing up of the themes and widgets section and partly because Baker popularized the cool jazz style that came about during the 40′s and WordPress is Jazy and Cool both.
