Newly Released WordPress 2.8 Promises to be Faster

Matt Mullenweg, founding developer of WordPress, announced the official release of WordPress 2.8. According to Matt’s blog post on wordpress.org, the new release has greatly improved the speed of the system due to changes in the way WordPress does styling and scripting. Matt also mentions in his announcement that WP 2.8 has over 180 new features and more then 790 bug fixes.

Some of these new features include:

• Theme Installation & Upgrades – Due to the popularity of the main system and plugin upgrade systems inside the admin panel of WordPress, they decided to add a similar feature for themes.
• Improved Widget Administration Interface – The WP dev team went back and completely redesigned the widget administration interfaces to allow WP users to edit widgets on the fly using drag and drop interfaces that they are used to.
• Cleaner & More Robust Widget API – Provides a better API for WordPress Widget Developers. With any kind of luck at all we should see more people developing widgets for WP like we do plugins.
• New Screen Options – The dev’s have added screen options to more administration pages allowing users to customize thier admin interfaces more to their liking.
• And Much More! (There’s always a “and much more”.. isn’t there?)

At the bottom of the annoucement Matt also touches on some of the future changes for WordPress, just not in great detail. Everyone should download a copy of WordPress 2.8 and check out the new features! As of the time of this posting, the upgrade option was not yet available in our wordpress administration panel.