WordPress 2.8 was released last week. I ran the auto-install directly through the WP admin interface on this blog and it was quick and painless. At first glance I didn’t notice many differences, but as I’ve been poking around I keep tripping over them.
I am working on building a new plugin/theme to power a simple project management system (more on this in a future post). And in working on that I came across the types of interface ‘improvements’ that often seem to accompany these WordPress upgrades. Active and inactive plugins are now all in the same list, not divided as in 2.y. You can filter what you see. This must bring this screen in line with techniques on other screens. And no big complaint, but I do find these little UI swaps between versions a little annoying — make up your mind already!
In setting up a new test blog instance I noticed that after creating blog with the admin user and its auto-assigned password a nice little message pops up informing you that you have the generated password, and inviting you to reset it. In the theme and plugin editors the syntax highlighting is a nice addition too.
The new body_class function is a great addition. It will let you easily do things like have different styles for different categories. It was possible to do this in the prior versions, it just took a little work. Tom and I did something like this manually to change the header image on the Rotair site design. But now anyone can do it as described by Nathan Rice.
In a Case Study repository project we needed to work through how to display information for different authors. And as I arrange for guest authors over the summer months on this blog I am also thinking about how to display guest author information. Now it is all a little easier which you can see demonstrated by Zack Dunn.
More will undoubtedly become apparent as I continue to use it. Read the highlights for yourself in the WordPress Codex or as highlighted by others in the links below.
Beginning in WordPress 2.8, themes will be able to take advantage of the
body_class()function to place location-specific classes on the opening<body>tag, usually located in theheader.phpfile of most themes.
One of the (many) nice updates the comes bundled in Wordpress 2.8 is with the_author_meta() template tag. This tag allows a developer to pull and display specific parts of any user’s information within a theme. Even though variations of this have been included in previous releases, this version has simplified it to a much easier syntax.
WordPress 2.8 Resources For Developers | W3Avenue
You can read the full list of over 180 new features, changes, upgrades, and improvements on the Codex. Following is our list of resources for more significant features/changes from developer’s point of view:
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Randall Rode's online home for thoughts, notes, and experiments with a wide range of technology topics. Visit the about page for info on my recent projects and professional background. I welcome your comments!
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