WordPress 2.7!

Napakasaya ko dahil sa wakas dumating na rin ang WordPress 2.7. Gustung-gusto ko na itry yung mga Beta and RC versions ng WP 2.7, but I can’t since hindi pa sila official release, at hindi ko maiuupgrade automatically. E tinatamad pa naman akong mag-upload upload. Kaya I just waited for the official release. Now I’ll make a list of things that I like about it and things that I missed from 2.6. Bihira ko lang gawin to, at ginawa ko lang talaga ito ngayon dahil sa sobrang aliw ko sa bagong itsura niya.

So what’s new with the WordPress 2.7? First thing that bloggers would notice is the new Admin user interface. The menus where now at the left side, and you have the option to “minimize” them so they won’t take too much space especially when you are working on a smaller screen. I love them when they are minimized, because when you hover your mouse on the menu while “minimized” you will see a “drop-right” list of available submenu. So when I hover my mouse to Dashboard icon (assuming that you have at least Akismet plugin installed), you would see the Akismet submenu as an option.

One more feature I love is the Plugins Administration Page. Aside from the fact that you can upgrade your plugins automatically using it, now you no longer have to install new ones by extracting and uploading them manually on your server. All you have to do is to make sure that certain folders have sufficient permissions, and you can now install plugins right in your Admin Page. This is so cool especially for me since I am so lazy doing that manual installation stuff.

The new built-in WordPress Upgrade option (which, as the name implies, upgrades your WordPress installation automatically), can also be considered as a major leap, since I may no longer need the plugin that does the same. I can’t try it yet though, since there’s no other major releases yet other than this one as of this posting.

Items in the Dashboard are now widgetized, so you can just click and drag them wherever you want them to be. You may consider dragging the most important widgets above less important widgets. I am wondering though why the “Other WordPress News” widget isn’t loading the latest feeds from Planet WordPress. I entered the correct RSS feed but still the widget doesn’t load the news.

I also like the Comments Management page. When you hover your mouse over the comments, management menus such as “Approve/Unapprove”, “Delete” and “Edit” would appear below the comment. For me this saves space to accomodate the more important information such as the comment text and its author.

The Posts Management page also offers something new. Now you can change the view from List View to Excerpt View. Since I’ve been adding excerpts to my posts (the ones you see at the main page which is different from the post proper), it is very helpful for me to check which of my scheduled posts doesn’t have an excerpt yet. They also applied the menu hover thing similar to that in the Comments Management Page.

Even though this version of WordPress is a blast, I miss some very small features that were incorporated in 2.6. I don’t hate 2.7 for that, it’s just that those features were somehow helpful to me. One example is that the new Dashboard now doesn’t list the number of scheduled posts. Number of posts were still there, but these posts where counted in general, not in a way that they were classified. How many posts were private, published and scheduled. Though I can find them in Posts Management page, but still, I expect to see them in Dashboard as well. Maybe I’ll just add some hacks later.

Not that I hate the Georgia typeface, it’s just that I miss the Lucida Grande font when creating posts using the WYSIWYG editor.

And the MAJOR thing that I am afraid was not incorporated in 2.7 is the Flash-enabled upload of images. Since Flash 10 was released, Flash-enabled uploads were affected, and you can no longer upload multiple files at once. I checked Ticket# 6979 if the fix was already created, but it seems that it wasn’t added in 2.7. Fortunately, NextGEN Gallery incorporated a fix on this problem, at least I can add new images all at once.