Looks like WordPress 2.1 (code name Ella) was released a little less than an hour ago. Look at me with my breaking geeky news.
Anything good in the new version? Let’s take a too-much-time-on-my-hands point-by-point look, just because I can.
- Autosave makes sure you never lose a post again.. I like it. I’ve gotten in the habit of copying everything to the clipboard before I hit Publish, just because of a few server hiccups a long time ago that resulted in lost posts or nearly lost posts.
- Our new tabbed editor allows you to switch between WYSIWYG and code editing instantly while writing a post. Eh. Don’t really care. The WYSIWYG editor is too flaky and not that useful, so I never use it. If they improved that, this might be cooler.
- The lossless XML import and export makes it easy for you to move your content between WordPress blogs. I didn’t even realize this wasn’t in WordPress yet, I guess I just got used to seeing it in multi-user WordPress.
- Our completely redone visual editor also now includes spell checking. Oh, they did work on it. Spell checking is a little late to be useful, since Firefox now automatically spellchecks your textarea forms for you as you type. But I might have to play with the new visual editor to see if it’s worth using.
- New search engine privacy option allows you take you to indicate your blog shouldn’t ping or be indexed by search engines like Google. Again, I didn’t realize this was only in WordPress MU and not in regular WordPress. But the difference is that WordPress MU doesn’t let you customize the ping list, it just always pings Pingomatic, so there’s no other way to disable pings than this option. With regular WordPress this should be the same as just emptying out the ping site list and putting a robots.txt file on your server?
- You can set any “page” to be the front page of your site, and put the latest posts somewhere else, making it much easier to use WordPress as a content management system. I’ve used a plugin to do this before, but it’s handy to have it in the core WordPress code.
- Much more efficient database code, faster than previous versions. Sounds like a benchmarking project for someone with too much time on their hands (possibly me, but probably not.) Actually, the benchmarks are probably all in the WP development mailing list or some place like that already.
- Links in your blogroll now support sub-categories and you can add categories on the fly. This might be more interesting to me if I kept any kind of blogroll. Do themes need to be modified to support sub-categories in it?
- Redesigned login screen from the Shuttle project. Since I’m the only one ever seeing my WordPress login screen — and even that is hardly ever, since I always have a login cookie on my main computers — I can’t get too excited about that.
- More AJAX to make custom fields, moderation, deletions, and more all faster. My favorite is the comments page, which new lets you approve or unapprove things instantly. I’m a little scared of people throwing AJAX all over the place, since it tends to be used for stupid things where it has no advantage. I’ll assume that the WordPress team did a good job, but I’ll have to play with it and see.
- Pages can now be drafts, or private. That’s nice.
- Our admin has been refreshed to load faster and be more visually consistent. Our admin? I guess that’s the wp-admin section where you run the site? Interesting, never noticed any visual inconsistencies before.
- The dashboard now instantly and brings RSS feeds asynchronously in the background. Cool.
- Comment feeds now include all the comments, not just the last 10. Cool.
- Better internationalization and support for right-to-left languages. Nothing that affects me, but cool.
- The upload manager lets you easily manage all your uploads pictures, video, and audio. That could be interesting. I’ve always thought that the upload feature and file management was lacking in WordPress. We’ll have to see if this improves things.
- A new version of the Akismet plugin is bundled. I use Spam Karma, so this doesn’t affect me.
And then some new features for developers. I’m curious to see what the “tons of new hooks and APIs” includes, even though I’ve only done a tiny bit of WordPress development myself. It sounds like the kind of thing that could lead to some cool new plugins.
I think the main reasons I’d upgrade would be for the auto-save and whatever new plugins show up that need the new hooks. Or because of bug fixes that they didn’t mention that turn out to be very handy. Or because everyone else is and I don’t want them pointing and laughing at me for not having asynchronous RSS feeds in the Dashboard.