I installed WordPress 2.7 beta 2 yesterday and so far I’m enjoying it a lot, its fast, organized, and looks very sleek. I was following the previews and conversations from various websites, and the WordPress podcast, about the fixes on the Beta 2 and that was enough to convinced me of doing this upgrade. There is no change on my website, the speed and the looks are the same.
In the inside the changes are awesome, the first noticeable change is the sidebar. The sidebar is present at all times and it gives you a menu of all the items you had before across the top of the screen in the admin area. The dashboard is also customizable, letting you add and remove elements from the screen, in turn this can help you with loading times if you are on a slower connection.
This version of WordPress has an automatic updater, this is good because when updating multiple sites the process can be tedious. The turbo option to run using Google Gears was moved from the top of the screen to the Tools menu in the sidebar, I think that this is very convenient.
Among the changes there are a couple of things that I’m missing, one is the ability of to see the my WordPress stats directly in the dashboard, this may change in the final version. If you are following the development of the new version of WordPress, I can reassure you that this version is the best. I’m including some images from my admin pages so you can see some of the changes that I’m already enjoying.
Ahh, Man! Seconds after releasing this post, they updated the software to WordPress 2.7 Beta 3. I will be testing and if there is anything to report, I will do so in the comments of this post.
They managed to put the Turbo option for the Google Gears back in the top-left section of the Admin area. I don't like it there but is not that intrusive.
Well thanks Mark, good thing cuz I really like the informative dashboard with my WP stats on it, as for the turbo button, it only makes sense to display only if you are not using it. Thanks for stopping by.
Yeah, there is someone working on updating the WP.com stats plugin to have a Dashboard widget.
What I'm looking into right now is whether we can hide the "Turbo" link in the header if Gears is enabled and synced, that way the nag only persists until you give in and use it (totally worth it… it makes the Visual Editor so much faster to load!).