Posted by Justin Dupre on Dec 11, 2008

Wordpress 2.7 Now Available To Bloggers

WordPress has really outdone themselves with this new version of WordPress. If you’d like to hop straight to the download link, you can find it here: WordPress 2.7 download. It seems only yesterday I had WordPress version 2.4 set up on a few blogs I was working on, but 2.7 just blows everything out of the water. It has become more efficient, faster, and extremely streamlined to make everything a whole lot easier for busy bloggers.

The first thing you’ll notice is that the place where you would previously select “Write”, “Manage”, “Design”, and etc. is now gone. WordPress has gone with a sidebar-style linking system, with an Ajax-slide effects that lets you click Posts which then lets you select “Edit”, “Add New”, “Tags”, and more. These similar options are available with Media (you can browse and add new media from the dashboad), “Links”, “Pages”, “Comments”, “Appearance”, “Plugins”, “Users”, “Tools”, and “Settings”. Several plugins have integrated this left sidebar, as well, allowing you to change settings without switching pages.

The fluid width of the design works out especially well when typing posts on a large monitor (I am currently working on a 22″ Samsung SyncMaster 2232 GW – highly recommended). Very little scrolling is needed, and it allows for a huge kitchen sink that you can deck out with all your favorite shortcuts thanks to the help of plugins like the TinyMCR Advanced plugin by LaptopTips.ca.

While you are writing pages and posts, you’ll notice that categories and tags have been moved to the right side of the writing area. They, as well as the toolbars below, can all be moved around to pretty much anywhere you want to order them. This will be a great feature for those that only need to use certain features and see the other ones as only getting in the way.

WordPress 2.7 is named Coltrane in honor of John Coltrane, an iconic Jazz musician more commonly known as “Trane”.

I’m sure there are tons of other things I’ve missed, so why don’t you let us know what your favorite features of the new WordPress release are.