WordPress Releases Version 2.8 “Baker”

Yester­day, Matt wrote a quick post over at the Word­Press Blog announc­ing that the WP 2.8 is imme­di­ately avail­able for down­load. There weren’t any offi­cial BETA test­ing pro­grams for V2.8 other than the Release Can­di­date 1 that was pub­lished ear­lier this week, but with­out any sig­nif­i­cant prob­lems with the RC1, they decided to launch the offi­cial update within a mat­ter of days.

Usu­ally, we don’t post about new Word­Press releases, but I think it’s an area that we have neglected some­what. Blo­gus­sion being a blog about blog­ging, it’s some­what crit­i­cal that we cover major updates in the soft­ware aspect of our niche. Hav­ing said that, expect more updates on major releases and crit­i­cal devel­op­ments on dif­fer­ent man­age­ment sys­tems (espe­cially WordPress).

Accord­ing to “offi­cial video” that tagged along with the release of ver­sion 2.8 – The peo­ple behind Word­Press have taken some time away from the visual enhance­ments and worked more on the actual frame­work behind it. Which sim­ply means; ver­sion 2.8 will look the same as ver­sion 2.7 but it will oper­ate smoother, faster and more cleanly.

Per­son­ally, this is exactly what I was expect­ing from Auto­mat­icc because when ver­sion 2.6 was released, they spent a lot of time and effort in improv­ing the visual dash­board. The new dash­board was stun­ning and wel­comed by many, but that doesn’t mean the old one was trash. I thought they could have worked more on the frame­work than the visu­als, but who am I to crit­i­cize their con­tri­bu­tions to the blogoshphere!

Any­ways, com­ing back to the newest release; Matt has promised that ver­sion 2.8 is way faster to use. I am unable to test out the newer frame­work because still haven’t recov­ered all my files from my old com­puter sys­tem, and I am still away from the admin­is­tra­tive side of Blo­gus­sion! Per­haps, our fel­low blog­gers using the Word­Press sys­tem can shed some light with some feed­back on the faster system?

Another use­ful fea­ture with ver­sion 2.8 is the “Theme Browser” which allows you to set a spe­cific cri­te­ria, search for themes match­ing that cri­te­ria, pre­view the located theme on your blog and even INSTALL it all with­out even leav­ing your blog or open­ing up a FTP client. This, I think is great because it will bring down the count­less num­ber of threads, found in WP-Forums ask­ing for theme instal­la­tion assis­tance. To sim­ply put — WP just made installing themes a whole lot eas­ier and quicker!

More Valu­able Fea­tures now in ver­sion 2.8

• Syn­tax High­light which allows you to high­light dif­fer­ent func­tions within a piece of code, such as seen in Dreamweaver. This will allow you to change, keep track of or even delete dif­fer­ent parts of your cod­ing quite eas­ily. It should be a welcomed-feature by many coding-enthusiasts!
• New Wid­gets Inter­face which pro­vides a lot more con­trol and a much sim­pler plat­form to work with. Mov­ing your wid­gets around is now a sim­ple “drag-and-drop” process, which allows you to exper­i­ment dif­fer­ent lay­outs with­out too much has­sle. Wid­gets have been trans­formed quite con­sid­er­ably with a series of use­ful update; as seen on the video.
• Improved Screen Options allows you to sort your screen into dif­fer­ent columns with a sim­ple click of a but­ton. These screens could be any­thing from the Word­Press Dash­board to your post­ing screen; allow­ing you to man­age mul­ti­ple tasks at once. Along with other improve­ments comes a small ben­e­fit to those of us that are not a fan of scrolling down pages, as users can limit the num­ber of items per page.
• Finally, Matt fin­ishes off by telling us that V2.9 and even 3.0 won’t be that far away with many new fea­tures. You can read the offi­cial arti­cle by Matt; here. If you haven’t still updated your Word­Press blog to ver­sion 2.8 – go ahead and do it now.

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