On Wednesday, WordPress 2.8, called “Baker” in honor of noted trumpeter and vocalist Chet Baker, was released to the public. This comes after several public release candidates and beta versions. The most noted improvements come on the themes, widgets, taxonomies, and overall speed. 790 bugs were also fixed.
It is recommended that you upgrade to WordPress 2.8, or delay the update until 2.8.1 (although I see no reason why you would want or need to – this is the final version). There are only minimal changes on the design front. Writing posts has a similar interface, albeit a bit cleaner and more simplified. You can change and remove the layout of many pages, making it easier to customize the back-end/admin area.
Syntax highlighting is available along with contextual documentation for the people who are editing themes and widgets through the WordPress interface.
Installing themes and new widgets has been refined, so there is no longer a need to go to the WordPress.org site to download them, although this may make some users think that they can “only” download themes from there.
The “Installed Plugins” page still needs a little work from what I’ve seen. You have to click “Upgrade Available” at the top. Now, this may be better than the previous version, with these plugins still hidden amongst other plugins, but for blogs with dozens of plugins, it still ads “work” to an otherwise simple process. Instead, a list of plugins, separated by comments, could be displayed, linking to the plugin on the page. This would make it easier to upgrade, although the best way to upgrade would be a “one-click” installer for all updates.
What are your thoughts on WordPress 2.8? Do you see noticeable improvements?
