I woke up this morning to find that WordPress 2.8 has finally be released. It was promised for the 10th June, but as I’m based in Europe, I didn’t get to see it till today. I’ve been running the RC down at WordPressGuru and haven’t really had any major problems. So, what’s new in this release? It’s all outlined in this video:
Word of the new release has already started spreading, but most people will find out about it when they log into WordPress and it tells them there’s a new version. I’ve uploaded two blogs using the in-built upgrade mechanism and everything was smooth, thought I had to restart the process a couple of times till it completed. Presumably users on faster servers won’t have the same issue.
Most of the changes are a step in the right direction I think, faster admin UI and better handling of widgets are among those. I’m a bit unsure about the theme uploader/upgrader as I think some people may lose theme customisations this way and I don’t think I like the new plugin interface, but all in all I’ve been looking forward to this drop.
One interesting thing to report. The WordPress admin interface was broken with Firefox 3.5b99, but this new drop of WordPress has resolved that issue because of an upgrade in the Javascript components used by the admin interface. So go ahead and upgrade to the latest versions of stuff, things seem to be working nicely!
(P.S. I’ve noticed that the upgrade has disabled one of my plugins that provided paged comments, but seeing that this is now a built-in feature of WordPress, I was quite happy for it to deactivate it)
Just a quick heads up re. WP2.8 – if you have the WP Security Scan plugin installed, it looks as though 1) An automatic upgrade to 2.8 isn’t possible (either through WordPress itself, or the 3rd party WP Auto Upgrade plugin) and once you do have 2.8 installed, new posts/pages published will lead to a blank page (with info added to blog), and old pages being editted will lead to the same blank page, without any changes being committed.
This may be down to a clash with another plugin I use, rather than solely WP Security Scan’s issue, but thought I’d give you a heads up. See my ‘‘ post for a little more info; hope you don’t mind the plug 🙂
Arrrgh, forgot to close tag for URL, sorry about that. Also forgot to use 2) for second point. Feel free to edit into normality and delete this comment Owen 🙂
I had a very easy time upgrading to 2.8 from 2.7.1 using the included automatic update.