Next you’ll begin to notice the new features subtly sprinkled through the new interface: the new dashboard that you can arrange with drag and drop to put the things most important to you on top, QuickPress, comment threading, paging, and the ability to reply to comments from your dashboard, the ability to install any plugin directly from WordPress.org with a single click, and sticky posts.

Digging in further you might notice that every screen is customizable. Let’s say you never care about author on your post listings — just click “Screen Options” and uncheck it and it’s instantly gone from the page. The same for any module on the dashboard or write screen. If your screen is narrow and the menu is taking up too much horizontal room, click the arrow to minimize it to be icon-only, and then go to the write page and drag and drop everything from the right column into the main one, so your posting area is full-screen. (For example I like hiding everything except categories, tags, and publish. I put categories and tags on the right, and publish under the post box.)

It’s all about you. It’s the next generation of WordPress, which is why we’ve bestowed it with the honor of being named for John Coltrane.

Last, but certainly not least, this may be the last time you ever have to manually upgrade WordPress again. We heard how tired you were of doing upgrades for yourself and your friends, so now WordPress includes a built-in upgrade that will automatically notify you of new releases, and when you’re ready it will download them, install them, and upgrade your blog with a single click.

(As with any interface change it may take a little bit of time to acclimate yourself but soon you’ll find yourself whizzing through the screens. Even people who have hated it at first tell us after a few days they wonder how they got by before.)

The Story Behind 2.7

The real reason Coltrane is such a huge leap forward is because the community was so involved with every step of the process. Over 150 people contributed code directly to the release, our highest ever, with many tens of thousands more participating in the polls, surveys, tests, mailing lists, and other feedback mechanisms the WordPress dev team used in putting this release together.

This was interesting to us, a blogging software release we actually blogged about, but the process was hugely informative. Prior to its release today Crazyhorse and 2.7 had been tested by tens of thousands of people on their blogs, hundreds of thousands of you count .com. The volume of feedback was so high that we decided to push back the release date a month to take time to incorporate it all and do more revisions based on what you guys said.

For those of you wondering why we didn’t call this release 3.0, it’s because we abhor version number inflation. 3.0 will just be the next release after 2.9. The major features in new point releases approach also works well for products like OS X, with huge changes between a 10.3 and 10.4.
The Future

Those of you following along at home might have noticed this was our second major redesign of WordPress this year. Whoa nelly! While that wasn’t ideal, and I especially sympathize with those of you creating books or tutorials around WordPress, there’s good news. The changes to WordPress in 2.5 and 2.7 were necessary for us to break free of much of the legacy cruft and interface bloat that had built up over the years (gradually) and more importantly provide us with a UI framework and interface language we can use at the foundation to build tomorrow’s WordPress on, to express ideas we haven’t been able to before. So at the end of 2009 I expect, interface-wise, WordPress to look largely the same as it does now.

That said, we couldn’t be more excited about the future with regards to features. Now that we’ve cleared out more basic things, we are looking forward in the coming year to really tackling media handling including audio and video, better tools for plugin and theme developers, widgets, theme updates, more integrated and contextual help, and easier integration with projects like BuddyPress and bbPress.

Automattic, WordPress’ parent company, has been working for to expand and integrate the social network features of the BuddyPress plugin ever since BuddyPress creator Andy Peatling joined Automattic earlier this year. While WordPress remains vague about its goals for BuddyPress, clearly, with competitor Movable Type already well on its way to creating an out-of-the-box social network tool, WordPress would like to offer something similar.

Mullenweg writes in the announcement of WordPress 2.7 that the new framework has stripped out the cruft of earlier releases and leaves a “foundation to build tomorrow’s WordPress on, to express ideas we haven’t been able to before.”

Will tomorrow’s WordPress include the ability to build your own Facebook? BuddyPress is already available as a development release, but it doesn’t look like there will be any major changes or new features to coincide with today’s WordPress update.

But for now at least WordPress fans can take advantage of the redesigned WordPress 2.7 interface which makes managing your blog quite a bit easier.

Of course the last time WordPress tinkered with the publishing interface (in version 2.5), the always vocal blogging community reacted negatively, calling it a step backwards. This time though, you’d  be hard pressed to find someone who thinks the new interface is anything but stunning.

Even better than stunning is the amazing amount of customizations options — if the new interface isn’t to your liking, just hide, drag-and-drop, rearrange or resize the elements until it is.

There are also some very useful new features like the ability to create “sticky” posts, posts that remain on your homepage no matter when they were published, as well as some great new comment moderation tools.

The new dashboard is perhaps the biggest change. In early versions of WordPress the dashboard was mainly used to show the latest WordPress development news. Version 2.7 completely changes that with modular dashboard that’s customizable on-the-fly. With WordPress 2.7 you can even compose a post and reply to comments directly from the dashboard.

Taking a tip from Tumblr and other microblogging systems, WordPress 2.7 includes a bookmarklet that makes re-blogging content much easier — just select something to quote, click the bookmarklet and your post is off, no need to visit the admin page or jump through any hoops.

The revamped WordPress 2.7 also takes the pain out of upgrading. Rather than needing to manually upgrade your WordPress install with FTP tools, now you’ll be able to simply click a button in the admin interface and WordPress will download and install updates for you.

WordPress 2.7 is definitely a worthwhile upgrade, you can grab the latest version from the download page. If you’d like to see the new admin in action before making the leap, check out this video, which offers a quick overview of what’s new in 2.7:

Wired.com

“Korea is the world’s sixth largest market in terms of internet users, and yet Google has a market share that can only be described as ‘minor’ in Korea,” co-founder Chang-Won Kim writes in his blog.

Portals such as Naver.com (the fifth most used search engine in the world, according to ComScore), Daum.net and Nate.com are much more popular in Korea, and according to the Korea Times, the move will allow Google to “spur development of user-oriented contents [sic] using the blogging tool, which will contribute to strengthening its search ability as well.”

TNC’s blogging software, TextCube, is an equivalent to WordPress in the U.S., and Kim boasts in his blog that TNC “services to 400K+ users, including 65 of Korea’s top 100 bloggers (as of 1H 2007).”

So if Google can sneak in through the bloggers’ back door, perhaps it can pick up some headway against the area’s dominant search portals.