Nowadays the great majority of Internet users are familiar with WordPress which represents the largest self-hosted blogging tool in the world. Being started in 2003 by a small group of people at the moment it’s used on hundreds of thousands of sites and seen by tens of milions of people every day.

One of the greatest things about WordPress, in addition to the fact that it’s absolutely free, is the feature of being completely customizable, thus giving the opportunity to use it for almost anything.

Since the appearance of the first version (0.7 on 27th of May, 2003) WordPress has been constantly updated introducing a lot of different improvements and offering greater functionality each and every time. Starting from the Version 1.0 most of the releases were named after well-known jazz musicians. After 1.5 release WordPress seemed to have something people really liked and it started to experience some fairly rapid growth (in a period of one year – from 2006 to 2007 – the amount of downloads increased in more than 2,5 times).

The last version – 2.8 “Baker” version named in honor of noted trumpeter and vocalist Chet Baker – representing the main topic of the given post was released on June 10th, 2009. Let’s check what new features and improvements of this release are.

“Baker” version of WordPress is a finish release with a significant amount of improvements to widgets, themes and speed. Despite the fact that at the very beginning you may notice just some minor changes, especially as regards the overall design, soon you will be able to find out much more. Altogether there are over 180 new features, changes, upgrades, and improvements (you can check the full list here); moreover it’s said that more than 790 bugs were fixed.

So let’s mention the most important improvements (or you can skip it and watch the video if you don’t like reading much :) )

  1. Speed: WordPress became significantly faster to use because of changing the way it does style and scripting.
  2. Changing themes: now you can install a theme with a single click from the admin
  3. Screen Options: there are new Screen Options on every page giving you the opportunity to rearrange the items (you can have a special look for each of the pages). The dashboard widgets can be arranged in up to four columns
  4. CodePress editor: now the syntax highlighting is integrated ensuring much better experience of editing the code of themes or plugins
  5. Widget user interface: a way better (redesigned) widgets interface allowing you to 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. Additionally developers now have access to a much cleaner and robust API for creating widgets as well.
  6. Comments: separating Comments into a separate postbox, from Discussion postbox, on the Edit Post screen; no more notifying post author of own comments; no asking for confirmation when marking a comment as spam
  7. and many others…

Here is the video about te abovementioned improvements:

There is also another nice point that should be emphasized… Due to the improvent that was intorduced in 2.7 version, now it’s much easier to update WordPress (the process is simplified into just a few clicks!!!). However you have to be carefull and don’t forget to backup your block as prompted when going trough the upgrade process. There is hardly a significant time difference, but it’s much safer for you to know that nothing will happen to your blog.

As a result I would like to mention that according to developers’ words they “are already thinking hard about the next versions, 2.9 and 3.0”. As regards the improvements which will probably be made, here are some of them: “media hanling, better dependency checking, versioning of templates and themes, and of course the fabled merging of WordPress and MU announced at WordCamp San Francisco”.

Related posts:

  1. Voting Plugins For WordPress Blogs

Tags: ,