After a long period of waiting, WordPress 2.7 is here, and I couldn’t be more happy. After just 10 minutes, I’ve fallen back in love with WordPress, it’s completely rejuvinated the entire system. Anyway, lets take a look at some of the awesome features and changes which have arrived for us:

The Dashboard

The new dashboard is like a work of art. The “Right Now” section is perfect, highlighting all the info which was previously slapped in a single line of letters, words and other mumble jumble. The Quickpress feature I have yet to use, but I can see it being immensely useful in the future, especially for our individual resources. The rest of the content is pretty standard fare, but it’s all organized well and you can drag bits around.

The Write Page/Edit Template Page

It’s wider! Finally, a large area to edit content, content is, once again, king. It generally makes writing easier, and the right sidebar has all the info you really need to create a post. Below the writing area is the less-used stuff, custom fields, custom excerpt, trackbacks and so on.

Plugins

The plugins system has had a massive upgrade. No more uploading, using FTP to delete or upgrade, oh on. Not only can we upgrade like before, we can install new plugins, browse for them, delete old ones, reinstall them, edit them. Pretty much anything you can think of, we can now do it all from the one panel. Wonderful.

Automatic Upgrade

It took a long time, and there was a plugin which did it for us, but automatic upgrade is now built into the WP system! Although I haven’t been able to test it, I hope that it’s a lot quicker than the slow “click here for next task” method of the plugin (not that I blame them, it was probably safer/better that way as a plugin).

Overall

The overall upgrade is beautiful. The design is perfect, it’s simple, functional and just works. Essentially what’s happened is that now, for the first time ever, WordPress has become an all in one panel. Once installed you can do almost everything through the panel. What is missing? Automatic installation of themes is. It should be possible, and I’d probably expect such a feature at some point in the future.

What sucks?

Sadly, there are still a couple of bad things about WordPress as a whole:

1. WYSIWYG editor is still tinyMCE. It simply doesn’t work well. Writing this post was a chore, I ended up using the HTML editor because it simply won’t format everything neatly.
2. As part of the editor, image uploads still put in a width and height attribute, even on “full size”. Yes, the attributes may be equal to the images size, but on a design like this, we need images to be flexible, and adding these attributes simply means we then have to remove them.
3. Again, tied to the last point, the image uploader. The flash uploader no longer seems to work for me, and I’m using the old browser one. Which is fine, it’s just a little error or something.

So, go download WordPress 2.7 and enjoy the benefits, they easily outweigh the minor problems.

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