Wordpress 2.1 “Ella” Released

The long awaited Wordpress 2.1 “Ella” has been finally released. It has been named after jazz vocalist Ella Fitzgerald. Wordpress 2.1 “Ella” fixes nearly 550 bugs found in the previous versions. These are the features Wordpress 2.1 “Ella” has to boast:

• Autosave makes sure you never lose a post again.
• Our new tabbed editor allows you to switch between WYSIWYG and code editing instantly while writing a post.
• The lossless XML import and export makes it easy for you to move your content between WordPress blogs.
• Our completely redone visual editor also now includes spell checking.
• New search engine privacy option allows you take you to indicate your blog shouldn’t ping or be indexed by search engines like Google.
• You can set any “page” to be the front page of your site, and put the latest posts somewhere else, making it much easier to use WordPress as a content management system.
• Much more efficient database code, faster than previous versions. Domas Mituzas from MySQL went over all our queries with a fine-toothed comb.
• Links in your blogroll now support sub-categories and you can add categories on the fly.
• Redesigned login screen from the Shuttle project.
• More AJAX to make custom fields, moderation, deletions, and more all faster. My favorite is the comments page, which new lets you approve or unapprove things instantly.
• Pages can now be drafts, or private.
• Our admin has been refreshed to load faster and be more visually consistent.
• The dashboard now instantly and brings RSS feeds asynchronously in the background.
• Comment feeds now include all the comments, not just the last 10.
• Better internationalization and support for right-to-left languages.
• The upload manager lets you easily manage all your uploads pictures, video, and audio.
• A new version of the Akismet plugin is bundled.

I won’t be upgrading my copy of Wordpress to 2.1 mainly due to the plugin compatibility issues. I’ll move to 2.1 only after all my plugins become compatible with it. But I would continue to play with this new release on my localhost. What about you?

Go get your copy of Wordpress 2.1 “Ella”