What’s New in WordPress 2.8.x?

As most of you may have realized by now, it is always a good idea to wait a while before upgrading to the latest version of WordPress.

One reason is you have to give the plugin authors time to update, if any are needed on their plugins. The second advantage to waiting is that all the security bugs get ironed out. In case you noticed, WP 2.8 was followed by 2.8.1 up to 2.8.4 pretty quickly.

I finally upgraded at 2.8.4 and all the plugins seem to be working flawlessly and I haven’t even updated all of them as yet so that is step number two.

Now for the new features:

More Screen Options

Starting with your dashboard, you will find new screen options including choosing the number of columns you want on the page (this is pretty neat btw). The screen options have been enhanced for every section.

Manage Your Themes

What a relief! You can now not only activate but preview and delete the theme right from your theme management page. It was great to have this functionality with plugins. It is just as good to see it come to life with the themes.

Install New Themes

And if you think managing themes is a breeze, wait till you check out the new install theme option. You can directly upload a theme in zip format or choose from the zillion free ones available.

Theme Editor

One very nice change in the editor is the new function name lookup option.

Managing Widgets

If there was ever a section in urgent need of improvement, it was the widgets. And that is exactly what it got. This section has had a page lift and dragging and adding widgets to your sidebars has never been easier. One widget you will love is the text/html widget. You can now add it multiple times to your sidebar to add any text/html you may want to in between all the other widgets. Pretty useful!

There is also an inactive widgets section. That is if you want to deactivate a widget but not remove its settings.

Comment Management Made easy

In the edit post area, there is a new section for every post. And this is the comments section. Here you can view, edit, delete and perform any function related to comments for that post. Yes you can add your own replies, too.

Adding Tags

Not only can you add tags, tag slugs, you can also add tag descriptions if you so wish. Find this under Posts – Post Tags.

TimeZones

This can be found under Settings – General. It allows you to choose a city in the same time zone as you. Daylight savings is also taken into account with this new change.

A worthwhile upgrade from WP 2.7. Now time to see what 2.9 will bring.