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WordPress 2.1 “Ella” (named for jazz vocalist Ella Fitzgerald) is now available on the WordPress website. Here’s a sampling of what’s in the new version:

• Autosave makes sure you never lose a post again.
• New tabbed editor allows you to switch between WYSIWYG and code editing instantly while writing a post.
• The lossless XML import and export makes it easy for you to move your content between WordPress blogs.
• Our completely redone visual editor also now includes spell checking.
• 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.
• Much more efficient database code, faster than previous versions. Domas Mituzas from MySQL went over all our queries with a fine-toothed comb.
• Links in your blogroll now support sub-categories and you can add categories on the fly.
• Redesigned login screen from the Shuttle project.
• More AJAX to make custom fields, moderation, deletions, and more all faster. My favorite is the comments page, which new lets you approve or unapprove things instantly.
• Pages can now be drafts, or private.
• Admin has been refreshed to load faster and be more visually consistent.
• The dashboard now instantly and brings RSS feeds asynchronously in the background.
• Comment feeds now include all the comments, not just the last 10.
• Better internationalization and support for right-to-left languages.
• The upload manager lets you easily manage all your uploads pictures, video, and audio.
• A new version of the Akismet plugin is bundled.

The press release also says there are easter eggs hidden throughout the program, so that’ll be interesting.

Developer Features

Developers will like the cleaner code in this release (much better than 2.0!). It includes hundreds of enhancements that will enable a new generation of richer plugins. A few of the things included:

• Pseudo-cron functionality lets you schedule events much like cron.
• Users admin can now comfortably handle hundreds of thousands of users.
• The new WP_Error class cleans up how we do error reporting and handling.
• The javascript loader makes it easier for plugins to include rich functionality.
• Tons of new hooks and APIs.
• Code inline documentation has been filled out.
• Image and thumbnail API allows for richer media plugins.
• Custom header, color picker, and image cropping framework.

Also noteworthy: 2.1 also includes over 550 bug fixes.

Future Releases

The WordPress team has set up a “hot-or-not” style feature board where you can vote on ideas for the next release of WordPress.

Nice job, guys!

Posted under Software