At 1100 hours ago, WordPress recently released it’s awaited major update. Such news as usual spread like wild fire and every blogger on the Earth must have been beating each other to the punch. Some Malaysia bloggers were also talking about what were the affects after their WordPress 2.1 update.
Ever since I converted from being a MovableType user, I’ve never looked back because of 2 lovely things about WordPress. Its installation is a breeze and its upgrading is just one-click away (I’m dead serious!). But WordPress also brought many other joys from the user-friendly interface to the various plugins found online – especially anti-spam plugins.
The WordPress 2.1 upgrade was suppose to be more than just bug fixes but an improvement of level to the current system. This new version brings many attractive features:
- Autosave makes sure you never lose a post again.
- Restructuring of menu tabs.
- The lossless XML import and export makes it easy for you to move your content between WordPress blogs.
- New search engine privacy option allows you take you to indicate your blog shouldn’t ping or be indexed by search engines like Google.
- You can set any “page†to be the front page of your site, and put the latest posts somewhere else, making it much easier to use WordPress as a content management system.
- Redesigned login screen from the Shuttle project.
- New comments page now lets you approve or unapprove things instantly.
- Pages can now be drafts, or private.
- Our admin has been refreshed to load faster and be more visually consistent.
- Comment feeds now include all the comments, not just the last 10.
- Better internationalization and support for right-to-left languages.
- A new version of the Akismet plugin is bundled.
That isn’t the full list of WordPress 2.1 features. And it seems the WordPress team will be scheduling more frequent releases.
Being a website designer that concentrates on usability design, I look at the user interface of an application into some detail. This new feel of the WordPress blog publishing system is definitely different. It now has a better and makes things feel more streamlined.
The buttons have a soft dark gradient in line with the Web 2.0 trend now and the Dashboard (administration homepage) does load faster upon log in.
Kudos to the WordPress team as well for now allowing users to use any Pages as their default landing page instead of merely having latest blog posts or having to hire someone to manually develop it.
And lastly, I congratulate and wish the team best of luck for trying to improve the WordPress engine further. It will be interesting to observe which direction will WP be going; blog publishing system or full-blown content management system.
[tags]Wordpress, WordPress 2.1, WordPress Malaysia, WordPress Bloggers, WordPress Users[/tags]