Several days ago, the new version of Wordpress “Coltrane” has been released. Because this time it is a major release, I spend some time to introduce the new features. Regarding to the Wordpress Blog: “…the first thing you’ll notice about 2.7 is its new interface. From the top down, we’ve listened to your feedback and thought deeply about the design and the result is a WordPress that’s just plain faster. Nearly every task you do on your blog will take fewer clicks and be faster in 2.7 than it did in a previous version. (Download it now, or read on for more.)…”

Dashboard

The main improvement of the new version is the complete redesign of the dashboard. The structure of it becomes more convenient and clear (especially in contrast to the old versions like 2.3). The new vertical menu bar on the left is separated in three parts: dashboard anchor, authoring actions and settings. classification eases the usage, especially for the authors and editors.

Authoring actions

The authoring actions have a similar classification as in last versions: you will find actions for working with posts, media, links, pages and comments. The corresponding pages has been completely redesigned and use prety much AJAX technology. In the media library, the new items can be uploaded to the library, that allows uploading of items not related to the posts or pages.

Settings

The settings control panel was also a subject of reconstruction. The most important features are: support of web installation of plug-ins (finally, no additional file system access to the server is required), automatic wordpress upgrade (making the InstantUpgrade plug-in absolete).

Upgrade

The upgrade seems to be running without any problems. As usual by major releases you need to run the DB upgrade using a built-in script. It worked fine for this page.

Conclusion

As a conclusion, I recommend the upgrade to the new version. The promise made by the developers in their blog is fulfilled and the blogging systems really operates quicker.  The dashboard redesign seems to be adequate and the features like online-plug-in installation and built-in web update are nice. If you use Google Gears, you can enable caching of most static parts and make the blog run very quickly.

Finally, after several weeks of delay, the TechPHP.net is launched. The journal focuses on general web-technology-related topics and serves as a homesite for multiple web resources. At the current stage, those web resources are:

• Wordpress – a popular web publishing platform for which several plugins and themes developed by TechPHP are hosted.
• DokuWiki – an easy-to install wiki system, often used as a knowledge base for which different extensions and visualization plugins are hosted.

In future, several other web topics like CMSs or shop systems probably bocome a subject of dicussion, but in the current point of time we focus on publishing of the already created resources.