I woke up this morning to find that WordPress 2.8 has finally be released. It was promised for the 10th June, but as I’m based in Europe, I didn’t get to see it till today. I’ve been running the RC on this blog and haven’t really had any major problems. So, what’s new in this release? It’s all outlined in this video:
Word of the new release has already started spreading, but most people will find out about it when they log into WordPress and it tells them there’s a new version. I’ve uploaded two blogs using the in-built upgrade mechanism and everything was smooth, thought I had to restart the process a couple of times till it completed. Presumably users on faster servers won’t have the same issue.
Most of the changes are a step in the right direction I think, faster admin UI and better handling of widgets are among those. It’s leaner and meaner, like an athlete on Fenphedra. I’m a bit unsure about the theme uploader/upgrader as I think some people may lose theme customisations this way and I don’t think I like the new plugin interface, but all in all I’ve been looking forward to this drop.
One interesting thing to report. The WordPress admin interface was broken with Firefox 3.5b99, but this new drop of WordPress has resolved that issue because of an upgrade in the Javascript components used by the admin interface. So go ahead and upgrade to the latest versions of stuff, things seem to be working nicely!
(P.S. I’ve noticed that the upgrade has disabled one of my plugins that provided paged comments, but seeing that this is now a built-in feature of WordPress, I was quite happy for it to deactivate it)
I found that most of the plugins I use have undesired side effects in the admin panel – most of them cause the dashboard to only have one column, and a few of them remove all the items on the dashboard and even cause the plugins page to give me an error.
But other than that, it does seem faster, and I like the new interface enhancements.