Most of you probably know that our blog is powered by WordPress, and last week version 2.7 Beta 1 was released for anyone who felt compelled to try it out. In the past I’ve never used a Beta version of WordPress on this blog, but I normally give them all whirl in a test environment to make sure they don’t leave me begging for mercy in the end.
After a few hours of tinkering around with this release I can say that it has been unexpectedly stable, and I decided to move it into our production environment already. To be honest I think this could be one of the biggest WordPress releases to date with all of the features it now offers when administering a site. Take a look at some of my favorites along with some screenshots:
- Revamped Admin Screen & Dashboard
The administration screen has been completely reworked to make use of widescreen monitors. Now all of the navigation items are placed off to the left side, but if space gets cramped you can always collapse down the sidebar.
- Automatic WordPress Updating
All I have to say is… finally! You can now update WordPress from the admin section of your site as long as you have (S)FTP access. No more downloading the ZIP file and carefully extracting the files trying to ensure that you don’t accidentally overwrite something important.
- Automatic Plug-in Installation & Browsing
Installing plug-ins couldn’t be any easier. You can either upload a ZIP file from your own computer, or browse the directory of available plug-ins and have them automatically installed.
- Inline Comment & Post Editing
You can edit both comments and posts from the management area without being taken to another screen. Editing posts in this fashion will let you change things like categories and publish date, but not the content itself. You can, however, edit the contents of comments this way.
- Inline Comment Replies
You can reply to comments from within the administration screen.
- Comment Threading & Paging
We haven’t set this up yet, but in a few clicks you can enable both nested/threaded comments and paging. By enabling paging you can control how many comments appear on any one given page.
- Sticky Posts
Nothing special here, but a nice feature regardless. You can finally set a post to appear before any other article on the homepage.
WordPress 2.7 Release Candidate 1 is expected to be released on November 10th, and the final release should be ready by the end of the month. If you don’t feel comfortable running a pre-release version you’ll only have to wait a few more weeks to get all of these exciting features!
These features look cool, especially the comment threading and paging, that will come in handy, and the automatic updating sounds like I will be able to get rid of my wordpress automatic update plugin I currently use.
From a Nub to a Pro, is there anywhere I can go to get help starting a blog?
WordPress has a pretty good guide set up:
[codex.wordpress.org]
Any chance that it includes a stop emailing upon new registration?
Is there a simple cms for a small website (less than 15 pages); that needs text update by no more than 2 people once a week. Everyone one I have looked at is overkill and blog style format.
Looking really good, I really like what Wordpress has done with the admin section.
I don’t see an option for that.
Yeah, I can see how most of them would be overkill for you. There is a Twitter-style WordPress setup that’s available though:
[cybernetnews.com]
thanks alot great infos
Thanks! Very interesting.