WordPress 2.1

February 9, 2007 by 2 Comments

It’s been a bit over two weeks since the release of the long awaited WordPress 2.1, codenamed Ella, and although I had upgraded one of my blogs the very next day when it became available, it’s only now that I finally have some time to post about it.

First of all, please go and read the official announcement of WordPress 2.1. Once you learn all the new features, you will immediately know whether it’s worth upgrading or not.

If you have WordPress 2.0.5 and anything below it – don’t even waste your time: it is time to upgrade! Get at least version 2.0.7, although in most cases you should be okay just jumping up to 2.1.

There are many wonderful features in 2.1, but I personally like the following ones:

  • Autosave – an AJAX-powered feature to save you from losing any of your ingenious posts again. Quite often, having typed a page or two of text, you lose your text if your browser crashes or something else interferes before you hit the Save button – so this Autosave feature is a real saver (pun intended).
  • New visual editor for posts and pages – a much better looking editor which has a different tabbed interface for easier switching between post and its HTML code and also includes a spell-checker. It pleases me a lot that all the dialog windows appear normally in Firefox 2 now, cause they definitely were buggy in WordPress 2.0.7.
  • Admin area rework – it works much faster, thanks to more AJAX code and a cleaner CSS.
  • Upload manager – for a much easier uploading and management of your media files

Hope I got you interested in at least giving it a try? Although if you haven’t done this by now, there’s hardly anything to convince you. As a last resort kind of a thing, I offer you a 10 Things You Should Know About WordPress 2.1 by Aaron Brazell at Technosailor. His article gives a great introduction to new features, and I think you will benefit from it even if you think you know enough.

Filed Under: blog, wordpress

Comments

  1. Dan and Jennifer says
    February 25, 2007 at 11:24 pm

    Hey Gleb,

    One question here – do you know if the new WP 2.1 visual editor still strips out stuff it doesn’t like, such as Javascript, inline CSS, and YouTube/GoogleVideo embed code?

    It just wasn’t usable for us in the older WP release for those reasons, but we found a commercial replacement – WYSIWYG Pro which works.

    Though I’d really like a built-in spell checker and auto-save. :-)

    Thanks!
    Dan

  2. Gleb Reys says
    March 7, 2007 at 6:47 pm

    To be honest, Dan, I’m not sure. I haven’t used any of the JavaScript or video code in my posts here. I presume, the problems are still there, but would suggest you give it a try to confirm.

    WYSIWYG Pro looks like a mighty tool, but it comes at a price I’m not willing to pay just yet. Besides, it’s very universal and a bit complex for me – while TinyMCE looks nice, clean and simple.

    Thanks for stopping by! All the best!
    Gleb

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