WordPress just released their latest WordPress for users to download and test. If you want the latest version and are not afraid of bugs and errors, go ahead and download WordPress 2.8 Beta 1. Unless just wait for the final release that is expected around June 2008.
Among the new features of WordPress 2.8 are:
User Features
- New Theme Installer routines
- Add CodePress syntax highlighting to Theme and Plugin editors
- Add Documentation(function) lookup to Theme and Plugin editors
- Use “Custom Header” for menu text and revise Default theme to reflect change
- Separate Comments into a separate postbox, from Discussion postbox, on the Edit Post screen
- Make tags accessible without Javascript on the edit screen
- Don’t ask for confirmation when marking a comment as spam
- Don’t notify post author of own comments
- Allow the dashboard widgets to be arranged in up to four columns as set via the Screen Options tab
- Make titles into links in Dashboard Right Now module (this was in 2.7.1)
- Improved Admin icons (grey-to-transparent shadows)
- Update Blue Admin Color Scheme
- Press This improvements UI, quoting fixes, plus ability for Contributors to use Press This
- Add column “Rating” in Administration > Links > Edit
- Improve installer to help people entering wrong email addresses
- Improved Widget user interface
Development, Themes, Plugins
- Improved database performance
- Drop post_category column from wp_posts table, and link_category column from wp_links schemas
- Fix delete statements to ensure data integrity when innodb and foreign keys are used
JS script loader Improvements
- jQuery 1.3.2
- Improvements to the script loader: allows plugins to queue scripts for the front end head and footer, adds hooks for server side caching of compressed scripts, adds support for ENFORCE_GZIP constant (deflate is used by default since it’s faster)
To Download WordPress 2.8 Beta 1, go to WordPress.org website