Scott’s Spiel

About 3 weeks ago I wrote a post showing some new features for WordPress 2.7. Since then there has been a bit more developing going on and this post touches on a few more features.

As I mentioned back then, things can and very likely will change by the time this release is completed so don’t come back complaining to me when things don’t look the way the do here.

A excellent post on the Weblog Tools Collection has also appeared between these posts and this goes into some more detail about the major additional features. The comments on this post were an interesting read with many people split over yet another admin design change. Whilst I can understand where they’re coming from, 2.7 does make a few good changes that I know I’ll certainly find useful. My advice to critics therefore would be to give it a try and see what they think. If Subversion isn’t something you’re familiar with then feel free to ask for a bit of help.

The main object of this recording is to demonstrate the new threaded comments. This allows commentors to reply specifically to a previous comment. At the moment it’s being titled a “first cut” and there still needs to be a lot done in regards to getting it looking like a normal part of a theme. However it offers a considerable advantage to those with quite active blogs (mine probably not the best example) where replies to comments can easily be lost. Compared to some of the plugins that do the same job this first cut also seems just that little better although I’m sure that could be attributed to the core devs having core code to play with.

Take a look at the recording and then I’ll go on about some of the more minor new features included here.

The video (.mov) is quite large and the quality isn’t the greatest but it should get the point across. The idea of threaded comments should really speak for itself. As far as I’m lead to believe it will be up to themes to support threaded comments and using them is likely to sacrifice at least a little customisation. This really would be time for theme authors to get a copy of 2.7 and have a look at just how difficult implementing threaded comments will be.

Other “goodies” present in the video include the option to add (and, with threaded ones, reply to) comments from the admin screen and the ability to select what is displayed on the new post screen. These seem pretty minor but the latter is something I’m quite happy about.

Behind the scenes things are also shaping up quite nicely. 2.7 will introduce some new APIs and refine a few more. Inline documentation efforts from Jacob Santos and (heh) myself are set to help developers considerably. My contributions have certainly slowed as I’m soon to return to full time education although I hope to complete at least another file before 2.7 is out.

On the whole there seems to be a lot of debate regarding the new admin UI and the core team’s survey (now closed) will hopefully help there. Personally, I’ve never been too fond on the default UI and have had Fluency Admin installed since I heard about it. I’ve only recently noticed how similar it actually is to the 2.7 UI which is perhaps why I’m not so concerned about the change.

This release should really put WordPress quite high up in the list of “Useful web apps” and I’d challenge anyone disputing the use of WordPress as a CMS…especially for free.

Featured, Geeky 2.7, wordpress