There has been an incredible amount of hype circulating around the WordPress community during the past few weeks regarding the up-and-coming release of WordPress 2.7. 2.7 should most definitely take the cake for the most-hyped release of WordPress, thanks to the brand new administration panel that will be coming along with the new release–the first major administration panel redesign since… the end of last March.
Indeed, it hasn’t even been eight months yet since the release of WordPress 2.5, which came billed as having a radically newer, cleaner, and less cluttered administration panel and Dashboard. However, as I mentioned in my WordPress 2.5 review, its administration panel really wasn’t that different, other than having a newer theme that was much brighter on the eyes, compared to the blue colors of WP 2.0-2.3.
And so, apparently, the good folks at WordPress went back to the drawing board this summer to look at how to further improve the WordPress admin interface, but this time, they came up with a codename for the new project called Crazyhorse (though I don’t get what’s so crazy about making software better), and this time, they claimed to use lasers in their testing. Great. (Actually, they apparently talked all about it at a WordCamp SF 2008 session that I missed because I had to leave early.) And since then, the hype has been alive and well on the WordPress Development Blog. They’ve been doing surveys since September to get feedback on what the interface should be like, showing off videos and stuff about what the new Dashboard looks like, and for Pete’s sake, they’ve even announced each beta release of 2.7 on their development blog, something that they’ve never done before! (It might be smart if they put a warning in their beta release posts about some of the possible problems inherent with running a beta for those crazy people out there who upgrade and then find something screwing up…)
I have given the latest Beta 3 of WordPress 2.7 a try, on a separate testing installation. (All of my live blogs are still using 2.6 and I won’t be updating until 2.7 is final.) While I am going to save a complete review until after it goes final and I’ve had a chance to give it a try on my REAL blogs, I will say that the new layout is quite impressive once you start to figure it out–the transition takes awhile to adjust to. The navigation has fundamentally changed (gone are the “Write”/”Manage” verbs that used to be part of the navigation and in their place are nouns like “Posts”, “Pages”, “Media”, and “Links”), and there’s a lot more AJAX inserted into useful spots. Many of the screens are now a lot easier to rearrange and customize to your liking, and satisfy a number of qualms about things that I felt should have been in WordPress 2.5. There are a couple of unexpected glitches that randomly pop-up, particularly in the drop-down navigation menus, so it is going to take awhile for me to fully adapt. But then again, it took me awhile to fully adapt to WordPress 2.5 as well, but I did.
All in all, I’m looking forward to the eventual release of WordPress 2.7, which will definitely help make WordPress a more attractive option for bloggers and content creators. Quite frankly, I think it would serve it more justice to make it WordPress 3.0, but I don’t really have much say in that now, do I?
Tags: 2.7, administration, Automattic, beta, Blogging, Crazyhorse, Dashboard, interface, preview, release, WordPress
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