Back in November, it was announced that WordPress 2.4 would be delayed, moving its expected arrival date to January 24, 2008. Now it looks like it won’t be arriving at all.

According to several sources, it looks like the team wants to avoid a rushed release and instead focus on the March deadline for WordPress 2.5. As a result, we will not see a WordPress 2.4 at all, but instead move straight to WordPress 2.5.

It looks like in addition to the (unanticipated) new admin panel and security updates, we can expect some significant changes to the WordPress codebase. Due to the delay, I think this is a good move. I’m not a fan of rushed releases, so a little extra wait doesn’t bother me.

There has been a lot of anticipation building for WordPress 2.4, which has been in the works for awhile now.  There are going to be several positive changes, but one that has gotten some mixed reviews are the planned changes to the look of the WordPress dashboard.

Though we don’t have a release candidate ready to view yet, Hyper123.net has posted a live preview of the WordPress 2.4 dashboard.   Not every feature included functions properly, but it will give you an idea of what we can expect in WordPress 2.4.

Here is a screenshot of the WordPress 2.4 dashboard:

You can also check out this video walkthrough on Tubetorial.

What do you think about this early look at the change?

[via Weblog Tools Collection]

According to Ryan Boren, it looks like we can expect WordPress 2.4 to be delayed from its original due date. It was originally scheduled for December 12, 2007, but is now scheduled to be released on January 24th, 2008.

Reasons for the delay include the holidays and an upcoming baby (congrats Ryan!). According to Ryan:

With the holidays upon us, a new baby Boren coming next month, and a new admin design to implement, we’ve decided to push the release of WordPress 2.4 out to January 24th of next year. I updated the roadmap with the new date.

The WordPress team has promised that while version 2.3 focused a lot on the infrastructure of WordPress, version 2.4 will bring a lot of to the user interface and the user experience, as well as some speed improvements and caching changes.