For those of you who love to be on the cutting edge, you’ll be happy to learn that the Beta 1 version of WordPress 2.8 is now available for download. As always, with these types of releases, we recommend you use it in a test environment, rather than using it on a live website/blog. I usually recommend people wait until the release candidates (RC) before you can be comfortable using it on a live site.
For those interested, here are a few of the things included with the WordPress 2.8 Beta 1 release:
- New Theme Installer routines
- Add CodePress syntax highlighting to Theme and Plugin editors
- Use “Custom Header” for menu text and revise Default theme to reflect change
- Separate Comments into a separate postbox, from Discussion postbox, on the Edit Post screen
- Make tags accessible without Javascript on the edit screen
- Don’t ask for confirmation when marking a comment as spam
- Don’t notify post author of own comments
- Allow the dashboard widgets to be arranged in up to four columns as set via the Screen Options tab
- Add column “Rating” in Administration > Links > Edit
- Improve installer to help people entering wrong email addresses
- Per Page option for plugins
- Show absolute date instead of relative date for scheduled posts
- Autosave post/page when pressing Control/Command+S
- Add toggle all button to the Gallery tab in the uploader
- Support more than one gallery on the same page
- Add per page option to Screen Options for comments, posts, pages, media, categories, and tags
- Show Tools menu for all users so they can access Turbo
- Fix most popular link category list
- Add description field for tags
- “Choose a city in the same timezone as you” for Timezone in Administration > Settings > General
- In upgrade process, provide better explanation for database upgrade message
- Enforce unique email addresses in Add/Edit users
- Hide things that need to be available to screen readers via offscreen positioning
- Use invisible class for hiding labels and legends
- Use a semantic class name for text targeted to screen readers
To those who are interested in putting WordPress 2.8 to the test, you can download it here.
Kyle Eslick
Kyle Eslick is the founder and primary author of WordPress Hacks. You can learn more about him at KyleEslick.com or you can follow his personal tweets here.
Thanks for releasing this version. 
As your site has a lot of widgets, so I think it will significantly reduce the server usage. 
I'd love to do the 301 redirect, but it seems that with Wordpress's canonical URLs, redirects create infinite loops that ...
Great gallery. But I wasted 3 months to find a good free wordpress template and finally no one was customizable ...
Looking forward to the final release.
Hope it will be sooner.
Yeah agree with Roseil. Lets how it will work.
Just saw this update on Twitter and seems like wordpress is keeping up its promise by giving the best of feature with every new release.
I don’t see any major feature at all, so how is this 2.9 and not 2.7.x?
typo: with 2.9, I mean 2.8
Hi,
I will only update my blog once they officially release 2.8. I really like the widget API functionality. I’m sure it will help out us users and developers.
“Show absolute date instead of relative date for scheduled posts”
Does that mean, showing the actual date of when it was posted? Instead of the date that someone might have potentially edited? I am not sure I understood that correctly.
Either way… I am really excited, I absolutely love it when a new wordpress version comes out, can’t wait for the RC so I can use 2.8
Thanks for sharing this. In fact this should be great thing for wordpress users. Although i am not a wordpress user, lots of new features with this version are really exciting.
It always makes me nervous when new versions come out of scripts that use plugins and templates.
Will themes & plugins that worked with 2.7 still work with 2.8? Is it a complete redesign?
Once you’ve installed wordpress you have a basic functioning web site. At this point you can easily download free (and paid) themes and plugins. THey just go into your public_html\wp_content\templates or plugins folder.