WP 2.8 was just released, and with automatic upgrades it only took about 1 minute to update SS!AB. The main changes:
- Speed Increases: I didn’t really notice it at first, but when publishing and updating posts, WP seems much faster.
- One-Click Themes: Good to see them carrying over this idea. The search is quick, although I’m not sure how good the results are.
- CodePress Editor: Editing without syntax highlighting was pretty much horrible. I’m glad they finally added this.
- Widgets Interface: The previous one was terrible, and the new one is much more like the version 2 iterations back. I liked it, although when I was playing around with the interface, WP kept trying to add an RSS feed widget to my sidebar for no reason.
- Screen Options: Nice, but nothing really mind-blowing. I made my Dashboard 3 columns.
They also finally added support for Daylight Savings Time, so I can reduce my plugin count by 1. I haven’t had any trouble yet, so I went ahead and updated all my blogs. The releases really are getting a lot smoother as WP matures.
This post was written by...
Kabitzin – who has written 1971 posts on Sea Slugs! Anime Blog.
One of the founders of Sea Slugs, I handle most of the blog admin tasks while wearing my I AM BOSS shirt. I like my action series well choreographed, and my romance series extra trashy. I also have a soft spot for puns.
{ 12 comments… read them below or add one }
I think the poly column dashboard and the code editor are the best features of WP 2.8. Oh yeah, and tag descriptions (lol self-promotion) ^__^ The new widgets screen is a bit odd for me, saving the changes immediately.
And I have no dashboard at all after this update, lol.
oh, it was just lack of memory for Firestats…
Those stat programs EAT memory. I prefer to just use services like WP-stats where the stats are not stored in my database.
Yeah it does seem faster than the previous version. Gotta check out the widgets interface later.
Still waiting for a while for my plugins to catch up before I bother updating. I never put too much faith in WP’s development team.
Hmm, did the auto-upgrade not give you a confirmation message? The last line it left me with was “Upgrading database” but nothing happened after that.
Yes, it should say that the upgrade is complete…
Strange. I never got that message. Although it seems to be working ok. Hmm, I guess I’ll just cross my fingers and pretend I never had a problem. ;P
The upgrade database function can be buggy at times. It gave me a bad link the last time I tried to upgrade, which was luckily quite easy to solve. But as long as you can login, that means the upgrade was successful, otherwise you would still see the outdated database message.
I’ve noticed that the auto upgrades for plugins don’t work all the time either.
BTW, if you get the PCLZIP_ERR_BAD_FORMAT (-10) error after upgrading to WP 2.8 and trying to update your plugins, this thread has the solution (until WP 2.8.1 gets released). You just have to overwrite one file (put the http.php file in your wp-includes folder); the fix worked for me.