WordPress has long been used to power great blogs, my own included and on November 1st the team released a new public beta of the tool jumping from 2.6.3 to 2.7 but in my opinion, this is really a WordPress 3.0 with a lot of great new features but what’s the best part of the new upgrades? Here’s my picks, but you can vote for your own.
The new Admin Dashboard
Many people will dismiss the upgraded Administration tool as a simple redesign but it’s a lot more. As Jane explains in her piece on the new dashboard, it’s about optimizing space and using improved heuristics to make publishing (and maintaining) blogs easier. There is also a wonderful new screen shot (to the right here) uploaded to a related WordPress article which discusses the visual design.
QuickPress (Dashboard)
QuickPress is a new feature that allows users to publish a simple post directly from the Dashboard rather than needing to use the full Post system. This is great for people who post smaller articles or people like me who use external HTML editors to write and then paste into WordPress.
Contextual Access Tabs (Dashboard)
Contextual help and the ability to edit what items appear on your Dashboard directly from the contextual menus. These work a lot like right clicking in Windows, providing you rapid shortcuts to important items.
Sticky Posts
Well I’d like to say it’s about bloody time. Until now, what I’ve had to do to create a feature article is maintain a secondary category for posts called Features, when a post was no longer a feature I took it out of the category but this messed with my SEO work.
Reply to Comments from Admin
Post replies to users directly from within the WordPress admin panel. This saves a lot of time and server load.
Plugin Installer
One of the coolest features in WP 2.7, the Plug-ins can now be installed directly through the admin. No more needing to FTP files to your server.
Bulk Post Editing
There will be a lot less SQL work with the new WordPress 2.7 now that we can do bulk editing! Thank you.
Add Media Outside Posts
Traditionally all media in WordPress has been associated with a post but with 2.7 you can add media outside the blogging system which is great for people like me who store files such as my resume online.
Comment Threading
There’s a lot of plug-ins that will handle comment threading but in the new 2.7 it’s automatic.
Automatic Upgrade
Anybody who’s addicted to WordPress knows that there’s a lot of upgrades to handle. Well now with 2.7, the system will update automatically which is wonderful news.
There you have it, my top ten cool new features of WordPress 2.7. Did you get everything you wanted in this upgrade? If not, what would you have liked to see?
