WordPress going to have quite major release this April, with the new version 2.8. After version 2.7, only bug-fixed release on version 2.7.1 rolled out. Sounds like WordPress development process has become even more efficient, with single release to cater all the bug fixes.
Anyhow, the upgrading process no longer a nightmare, with the auto-upgrade feature introduced on version 2.7.
So what’s new in WordPress 2.8? The Codex 2.8 page list down quite numbers of new features. Some that visible to normal users.
- Improved Widget user interface
- Improved performance for script loading
- New Theme Installer routines(view the screen shot)
- Allow the dashboard widgets to be arranged in up to four columns as set via the Screen Options tab
- Press This improvements
- Show Tools menu for all users so they can access Turbo
- Improved database performance
- Make authentication more pluggable (read more here)
- Allow plugins to provide a canonical redirect_url even if WordPress does not provide its own(no longer needs canonical plugin?)
- Separate Comments into a separate postbox, from Discussion postbox, on the Edit Post screen
- Autosave post/page when pressing Control/Command+S
- Don’t ask for confirmation when marking a comment as spam (cool, really useful)
- Add Sticky to list of post states
- Add CodePress syntax highlighting to Theme and Plugin editors
- Allow a plugin to control how many posts are displayed on edit pages
