The long wait is finally over. WordPress “Ella” 2.1, named after the famed jazz vocalist Ella Fitzgerald has been announced publicly just a couple of hours back.
This was certainly a very nice way to start the day. I’d just sat down with a steaming cup of tea and fired up my browser, when my news aggregator (FeedReader) popped up a message from one of my acquaintance’s blog regarding a post that outlined the upgrade process to WordPress 2.1. I was so totally taken aback !!! To be honest I wasn’t expecting it anytime before the month-end and in light of the last few security patches, I had even begun doubting whether it would be on schedule. Nevertheless, this came as a very pleasant surprise.
Going through the upgrade story I figured that most of the old plug-ins are still compatible with it and shouldn’t present any problems. I plan to perform the upgrade ASAP. Meanwhile, here’s a list of the goodies that comes bundled with the new version.
- Autosave makes sure you never lose a post again.
- 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.
- 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 the 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. The comments page now lets you approve or unapprove things instantly.
- Pages can now be drafts, or private.
- 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.
There you go.. 
Terrific work from the guys at WordPress. Keep it up, yo !!
What are you waiting for ?? Go grab it…
