WordPress 2.8 Officially Released!

In case you haven’t noticed it yet in your WordPress dashboard, it looks like WordPress 2.8 has officially been released!  Don’t forget if you are currently using WordPress 2.7 or 2.7.1, you can use the one-click upgrade feature built into WordPress to upgrade! 

The changes from WordPress 2.7 aren’t as noticable as they were from 2.6 to 2.7, but it is always worth upgrading to the latest installation in my opinion.   As far as what is new, here is what the WordPress team had to say about the improvements in WordPress 2.8:

Major New Improvements

First and foremost, 2.8 is way faster to use. We’ve changed the way WordPress does style and scripting.

The core and plugin updaters in previous versions of WordPress have been such a success we decided to bring the same to themes. You can now browse the entire theme directory and install a theme with one click from the comfort of your WordPress dashboard.

If you make edits or tweaks to themes or plugins from your dashboard, you’ll appreciate the new CodePress editor which gives syntax highlighting to the previously-plain editor. Also there is now contextual documentation for the functions in the file you’re editing linked right below the editor.

If you were ever frustrated with widgets before, this release should be your savior. We’ve completely redesigned the widgets interface (which we didn’t have time to in 2.7) to allow you to do things like edit widgets on the fly, have multiple copies of the same widget, drag and drop widgets between sidebars, and save inactive widgets so you don’t lose all their settings. Developers now have access to a much cleaner and robust API for creating widgets as well.

Finally you should explore the new Screen Options on every page. It’s the tab in the top right. Now, for example, if you have a wide monitor you could set up your dashboard to have four columns of widgets instead of the two it has by default. On other pages you can change how many items show per page.

You can view the entire list of changes here.