WordPress 2.9 Features

Dougal has put up a list of what to expect in WordPress 2.9:

Here is the list:

  • Post Thumbnails: add an image to be automatically displayed with the post in various views (main page, archives, etc.). The WordPress logo on this post is added with this feature, plus a filter I added to my theme’s functions.php file.
  • “Trash” status: deleted items such as posts, pages, and comments now go to the “trash”, and can be recovered later, much like delete files in most modern operating systems.
  • Image editing: basic image manipulation for your media library. You can rotate, flip, resize, and crop images.
  • Widgets outside of sidebars: there is a new template tag called the_widget(), which allows you to put a widget anywhere in your theme.
  • Comment metadata: plugins and themes can now take advantage of arbitrary metadata for comments, just as for posts, pages, and users. This should make it easier to create plugins to highlight “popular” or “hot” comments, among other things.
  • Custom post types: general support for post types other than ‘post’, ‘page’, and ‘attachment’. This plus the custom taxonomy support we already have will go far to address those to like to claim that WordPress is not a ‘real’ CMS. We’ll be able to organize content in ways that I can’t even think of right now (I need more time to brainstorm).
  • Media Embeds: I haven’t had a chance to look over this all the way yet, but it’s basically Viper’s Video Quicktags folded into core (minus the editor buttons at this time), including support for the oEmbed standard. With oEmbed, you can just paste in the URL for a page containing embeddable media, and it can auto-detect the proper way to embed it in your post. Supported services so far appear to be YouTube, Google Video, PollDaddy, and DailyMotion. Plus, theoretically, any service that supports oEmbed, which currently includes YouTube, Flickr, Vimeo, Viddler, Qik, and Hulu, among others (according to the oEmbed site). Whoah, awesome! I’ll post a demo of this soon, but you can read Viper007Bond’s post now for more details.
  • register_theme_directory(): plugins can now add additional theme directories to be searched. This means that a theme can basically come bundled with its own themes. I’ve already got a project that’s been on the back-burner that can use this feature. I think we might seem some nifty uses appearing in the future.

For more information, check out Dougal’s post on WordPress 2.9 Features

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Confirmed WordPress 2.7 Features

Ryan Boren has posted a list of confirmed features that will appear in WordPress 2.7. Some of this features are still under development and they should be done soon.

  • New admin UI based on the crazyhorse experimental UI branch with new menus and navigation
  • New edit post page that allows dragging and dropping of meta boxes. Boxes can be expanded and collapsed as before and now also completely hidden.
  • Ability to hide columns on the content index pages
  • Inline editing of posts and pages on the content index pages
  • Comments XMLRPC API (Who wants comment moderation on the iPhone? Me.)
  • Reply to comments from the admin
  • Keyboard hot keys for managing comments
  • Threaded Comments and new wp_list_comments() API
  • Sticky Posts
  • Automatic plugin install and integrated plugin browser
  • Automatic upgrade of WordPress
  • HTTPOnly auth cookies
  • New HTTP request API
  • A new SSH2 filesystem abstraction for updates and installs over sftp

Theme update, install, and browsing may also get done in time for 2.7.

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