WordPress officially released the newest version of stand-alone blog software, WordPress 2.8. WordPress 2.8 is name Baker, in honor of the noted trumpeter and vocalist, Chet Baker. Below is a video about the latest WordPress release.
Source: WordPress.org
Highlights
- New drag-and-drop widgets admin interface and new widgets API
- Syntax highlighting and function lookup built into plugin and theme editors
- Browse the theme directory and install themes from the admin
- Allow the dashboard widgets to be arranged in up to four columns
- Allow configuring the number of items to show on management pages with an option in Screen Options
- Support timezones and automatic daylight savings time adjustment
- Support IIS 7.0 URL Rewrite Module
- Faster loading of admin pages via script compression and concatenation
New Features
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
- Fix comment paging for static front page
- 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 a Cancel Upload button and a Delete link to Administration > Media > Add New
- Add column “Rating” in Administration > Links > Edit
- Improve installer to help people entering wrong email addresses
- Improved Widget user interface
- Allow editing of all plugin files
- Improved Plugin search (this was in 2.7.1) on Administration > Plugins > Add New
- Per Page option for plugins
- Move “Install a plugin in .zip format” to new Upload tab under Administration > Plugins > Add New
- Show absolute date instead of relative date for scheduled posts
- Fix tags suggest for post quick edit and bulk edit
- Permalink editor changes and fix for pages
- Autosave post/page when pressing Control/Command+S
- Add toggle all button to the Gallery tab in the uploader
- Support more than one gallery on the same page
- Add per page option to Screen Options for comments, posts, pages, media, categories, and tags
- Overhaul of LiveJournal importer (also add define WP_IMPORTING)
- Import category descriptions for Administration > Tools > Import > WordPress
- Show Tools menu for all users so they can access Turbo
- Check for new version when visiting Administration > Tools > Upgrade
- In upgrade process, provide better explanation for database upgrade message
- Fix most popular link category list
- Add description field for Tags in Administration > Posts > Tags
- WAI-ARIA landmark roles to added to WordPress Default theme
- “Choose a city in the same timezone as you” for Timezone in Administration > Settings > General
- Remove My Hacks option from Administration > Settings > Miscellaneous
- Hide email addresses from low privilege users on Administration > Comments
- Allow case-insensitive logins
- Login and Registration pages noindex followed
- Give login screen proper iPhone viewport
- Enforce unique email addresses in Add/Edit users
- Make user_nicenames unique during registration
- Add “Send this password to the new user by email” option to Administration > Users > Add New
- Don’t set user’s Website url to http:// in Administration > Users > Add New
- Add password strength meter to Add User and Edit User
- Hide things that need to be available to screen readers via offscreen positioning
- Use invisible class for hiding labels and legends
- Use a semantic class name for text targeted to screen readers
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
- Enforce consistent ID types to allow for foreign keys to be defined between tables
- Add Sticky to list of post states
- Add a filter to the post states list
- Introduction and widespread use of transient and related filters
- Add filters so AIM, Yahoo, and Jabber IM labels, in user profile, can be changed
- Add hook “after_db_upgrade”
- Add hooks for the Users, Categories, Link Categories, Tags and Comments table columns
- HTTP API updates and fixes
- Add support for blocking all outbound HTTP requests
- Updated List of HTTP status codes
- Use SimplePie for widget and dashboard feeds
- Switch to pomo lib. Support gettext contexts. Deprecate long form functions
- TinyMCE 3.2.4.1
- Use Jcrop 0.9.8 for cropping
- Update pclzip to 2.8
- Update PHPMailer to 2.0.4
- Update SWFUpload to 2.2.0.1
- Improved performance for script loading
- Improved archive and calendar queries
- Cron spawning improvements
- Timezone enhancements for PHP 5
- Add WP_Widget class and move native widgets into WP_Widget
- Allow other taxonomies (e.g. post categories) to be used with wp_tag_cloud
- Add echo argument to wp_tag_cloud()
- Allow a plugin to control how many posts are displayed on edit pages
- Add “style” and “html” arguments to wp_list_authors
- Add “exclude_tree” argument to wp_list_categories and make exclude behave like exclude_tree when hierarchical is specified–this was actually a 2.7.1 change
- New Template Tag, the_modified_author
- Enhanced support for custom taxonomies
- Put page title before blog name in admin title
- Use https://api.wordpress.org/secret-key/1.1/ for the WordPress.org secret-key service
- Various phpDoc updates
- Refactor filters to avoid potential XSS attacks
- XMLRPC improvements
- Improved mysql2date coding
- Make authentication more pluggable
- Switch to using the ID when calling get_avatar internally to support caching plugins
- Allow plugins to provide a canonical redirect_url even if WordPress does not provide its own
- Drafts have post_date populated now, so look for a zeroed out post_date_gmt to determine non-scheduled nature
- Fixes to query_posts (obey post_type, drop orderby=category, use group by for meta key queries, remove meta_value from selected fields)
- New orderby=none parameter for use with query_posts
- Allow a plugin to filter the classes applied in wp_list_pages()
- Functions (get_adjacent_post_rel_link() and adjacent_post_rel_link()) to display relational links for adjacent posts in the head
- Add the sticky post grey background to the default theme
- Proxy support
- Let a plugin filter the expanded capabilities returned by map_meta_cap
- Allow the update period to be filtered in RSS/RDF feeds
- Store field types in wpdb object
- Add tag description functions tag_description and term_description
- Add page class to get_body_class()
- Deprecate get_catname()
- Use comments_open() and pings_open() in WordPress Default and Classic themes
- Add wp_trim_excerpt() filter
- Consolidate plugin/theme/core upgrade/install functions
- Add page-id-x class to body for pages
- Return empty list in wp_list_bookmarks() if requested bookmark category does not exist
- Allow menu reordering via plugin
- Add hook for updating user profile
- Add redirect argument to wp_loginout
- Add wp_lostpassword_url
- Add get_the_author_meta() and the_author_meta() functions
- Deprecate the_author_ID, the_author_login, the_author_firstname, the_author_lastname, the_author_nickname,the_author_email, the_author_url, the_author_aim, the_author_yim, the_author_mns, the_author_description and all their “get_*()” functions. (The full list at wp-includes/deprecated.php)
- Let plugins use screen layout columns
- Add labels to titles and text inputs
- Add hook for adding info to plugin update message
- Don’t do core version check from front page loads
- Allow a plugin to vary the comment cookie lifetime (or even remove the cookies altogether)
- Allow plugin to replace just the default help while preserving the contextual help
- New escaping naming convention
- Deprecate wp_specialchars() in favor of esc_html(). Encode quotes for esc_html() as in esc_attr(), to improve plugin security (ref. Development Updates)
- Deprecate sanitize_url() and clean_url() in favor of esc_url_raw() and esc_url() (ref. Development Updates)
- Add number/offset arguments to get_pages() (same parameters can be used for wp_list_pages()
- Make login more pluggable
- Add
the_widget()function to output a generic widget anywhere in a template - Allow plugins to override tz support enable/disable
- Fix combining category and tag queries
- Support IIS 7.0 URL Rewrite Module
- Recognize Expression Web 2 as IIS
- Allow multiple search form templates
- Introduce sanitize_html_class() and use it to give categories, tags, users etc meaningful classnames where possible but fallback to the id if necessary
- Allow a different role to be set for users when they are created in a call to wp_insert_user()
- Improve Filesystem method choice for ‘direct’; introduce FS_METHOD constant
- Add a hook in print_footer_scripts as in print_head_scripts
- Add a comment_moderation_headers filter
- Move upload_dir filter to before directory is created, so plugins can have a better effect
- Pass name to sidebar, footer, and header get actions
- Upgrader improvements, including move curl to last position and fockopen to 2nd position due to higher compatibility
- Updated Trac