Yep yep… I bet everyone’s talking about the WordPress 2.8 release. Just finally manage to get some time downloading and trying out their version 2.8 RC1 before the release on 10th of June 2009(which is Wednesday by the way).

I suppose everyone who uses self-hosted WordPress should do the same too! You should always test out your current plugins, WordPress themes to see if they are compatible with the new version of WordPress before you did the actual update.

Everything seems very much compatitble with the latest themes I made for clients, so no worries on my side! =)

So, what’s new in WordPress version 2.8 comparing to Coltrane(version 2.7.1)?

Here are a few highlights from WordPress.org itself

Quoted from http://codex.wordpress.org/Version_2.8

• New drag-and-drop widgets admin interface and new widgets API
• Syntax highlighting and function lookup built into plugin and theme editors
• Browse the theme directory and install themes from the admin
• Allow the dashboard widgets to be arranged in up to four columns
• Allow configuring the number of items to show on management pages with an option in Screen Options
• Support timezones and automatic daylight savings time adjustment
• Support IIS 7.0 URL Rewrite Module
• Faster loading of admin pages via script compression and concatenation

From the above checklist, the backend control panels has been making big improvement on functionality and user-friendliness.

You will notice some significant improvements on the loading speed in admin pages while still having more functionality than Coltrane (WordPress version 2.7.1)

Then we’ll have this new widgets interface above that allows you to drag and drop the widgets you want to appear on your blog. It does looks pretty interesting but I don’t really think they’d make much use other than looking more fancy.

Then we have a this new “Add New Themes” option under “Appearance” tab which allows you to choose, preview and install themes directly from the WordPress.org theme directory. So now we get to view the live demo of how a theme would look like on our actual sites instead of a dummy demo sites. This is one cool feature plus it’ll give more exposures to the themes listed in their directory.

These are pretty much of the new features which I think are worth mentioning. The rest of the minor updates and addons doesn’t really give me much use yet until I’ve actually notice them I guess.

If you’re looking for more info on this new release, do check them out at the official page here.

This update doesn’t seem to have what I been hoping for, a better solution to counter the spams. I’ve been blocking at least 3,100 spams since my last update to WordPress 2.7.1.

So what do you think about this WordPress 2.8 updates?