The new and upgraded version 2.8 of Wordpress was released this week and it has some great new features and much more speed as well as a ton of bug fixes.
“To make your blogging experience a cooler smoother ride”
This release is named after jazz legend Chett Baker and improves on the major update on features that came with the previous version Worpdress 2.7.
New Theme Browser
The biggest news that comes with Wordpress 2.8 is the release of a Theme Browser for much easier selection and installation of Wordpress themes directly from within the admin dashboard.
Remember that 2.7 brought us the Plugins Browser – well now Automattic have gone one step further and brought in similar functionality for themes.
You now have the facility to browse the entire Theme Directory at Wordpress and install a theme from there with just one click from the comfort of your admin dashboard! And what’s more you can enter selection criteria such as color, number of columns etc to narrow your search. Then just preview, install and activate the them you want immediately. So no more FTP. Awesome!
This is a great new feature that will be loved by everyone who uses Worpdress for their blog or website.
Much Faster Response Times
A lot of the Wordpress code has been re-written to make the software run a lot faster – this is one improvement is something we will all appreciate I am sure.
New Codepress Theme Editor
If you need or like to edit the php code of your Wordpress files via the Themes Editor you’ll be happy to know that there is a brand new CodePress Theme Editor, which gives you syntax highlighting and a load of new features to help you with these tricky tasks. Another great innovation.
New Widgets Interface
The interface which you use in Wordrpess admin for controlling and editing widgets has been redesigned. It’s now much easier to drag and drop widgets into any sidebar directly from a single screen. Another big improvement that also enables parking and the moving of widgets from sidebar to sidebar. Their is also now a widget API to help you code geeks!
Improved Screen Options
Some radical and subtle changes to the screen options in the admin dashboard have developed for Wordpress 2.8 and they are extremely useful as they provide extra flexibility.
With a single click you can now change the number of columns you seen onscreen to 1,2,3 or 4.
The same can be applied to the Post and Page editors where 1 or 2 columns can be easily selected.
Also in the content management areas where you find a list of posts or pages you can select how many you want to list per page to save on scolling. A long awaited feature.
Lots of Other Improvements…
Read more here: 2.8 Release Jazzes Themes and Widgets
What Next?
To enjoy all the facilities that you get with this new release you will need to upgrade you site to Wordpress 2.8. If you have cPanel hosting with Fantastico, like you get with my favorite web host company, Hostgator, you already know that this will be just a one-click upgrade.
Backup Your Wordpress Website Before Upgrading!
Don’t forget to do a backup first and de-activate your plugins before the upgrade, then re-activate them and test one by one after the upgrade to make sure there are no problems.
But don’t rush to do this just yet as you may find that the latest version has not yet reached all web hosts, but it will quite soon.
NOTE: If you want to teach yourself and Learn Wordpress 2.8 you can do all of this here on this website. The differences between Wordpress 2.7 and 2.8 are insignificant in the process of learning Wordpress, so everything I teach for 2.7 in these Wordpress Tutorials is still valid for 2.8.
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