WordPress 2.7 released

The WordPress team has published version 2.7 of WordPress yesterday. The first thing that users will notice is the new administration interface which was completely redone to optimize processes. The development team claims that nearly every task in WordPress 2.7 will take fewer clicks than it took in previous versions of the blogging platform.

The development focus was usability as WordPress 2.7 brings in a few exciting new features to the table. The long awaited option to moderate comments from the admin interface, mass editing of posts, automatic upgrades of plugins and the blog software itself are just a few of the new features.

Another new and exciting option is the ability to remove and position elements on the screen. This streamlines the WordPress admin interface quite a bit by bringing the needed elements closer together while removing everything that is not needed. Well, almost everything. Some elements cannot be removed obviously like the post form.

It will take some time getting used to the new WordPress admin interface as it moves the menu entries from the header to the left menu.

The update should not pose too many difficulties. The only problem that you can encounter are plugin incompatibilities. The Simple Tags plugin was one out of a dozen plugins that was not working with WordPress and you might have noticed display problems here at Ghacks earlier thanks to that. There is however an easy temporary fix for that to make the plugin compatible.

All that needs to be done is to edit the simple-tags.php file. Look for the line

if (version_compare($wp_version, '2.5', '>='))

and replace it with the following

if ( strpos($wp_version, '2.5') !== false || strpos($wp_version, '2.6') !== false )

This should ensure compatibility.

WordPress 2.7 is not the latest version anymore. The developers have updated WordPress several times in the meantime, and it is recommended to download the latest version directly from the official WordPress homepage.

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