My Goodness! What a long time has passed since the last time I’ve published anything new here. I have the impression that even I am a stranger in this place.

But anyway, here I am again, watching Automattic’s moves in the meantime trying to finish my Bachelor Theses project. By the way, just for your curiosity I’ve started the fourth and last year of my Military studies, hence I’m very pleased to tell you about it. Nevertheless, I won’t go into details so smile for I’m going to save you from that agony.

In respect of the chronology I’ll emphasize events one after another. Just as a note, what pushed me to write today is the stimulation by my friend Amir, whose blog I’ve set-up and hosted on my new server couple of weeks back, dubbed Lazio Fan Blog. He’s a Lazio addict, so if you happen to like Lazio too I encourage you to visit he’s niche for honestly he’s got a real good coverage about interesting events relating S.S. Lazio.

Again, what interests me the most is of course WordPress. I’m sure you already are aware of the small update concerning WordPress version 2.6. Thus, 2.6.1 fixes are generally addressed to international WordPress users. Hence, if your blog is in English you don’t really need to upgrade to it, referring to a very honest quote on WordPress Development Blog stating this:

If you’re happy with 2.6, however, keep on using it. You need not upgrade to 2.6.1 if 2.6 is getting the job done.

Thank you guys, that’s awesome, for I really am lazy when you force me to upgrade my blogs very often, as for you haven’t yet given us the pleasure to upgrade them automatically, but you, and you only know the reasons why you don’t want to do that. So I’m going to seriously consider your recommendation this time.

In the other hand, on a daily basis check-up of my blogs I realized I wasn’t able to enter Dashboard here at itechnologize, even worse the sidebar of this new theme I’m using didn’t show up at all. Couple of minutes later, after analyzing the database, checking potential file changes I found out that Flickr Thumbnail Photostream was causing all that undesirable mess. Certainly, deactivating it was the quickest and most tireless action to take, afterwards everything was set back to normality.

Eventually, my curiosity allows me not to stay silent, hence, I made a surf on the upcoming version of WordPress, the 2.7. And frankly speaking I happen to find some neat features coming with it. Just to not let it slip away unmentioned, WordPress 2.7 is yet under development, and planned to be released somewhere on November this year. However, I wanted to get my hands dirty earlier so I went there and grabbed that bleeding trunk.

So far, I haven’t spotted any changes on the database itself, but inside the admin panel there’s something useful though. The guys behind WordPress showed to be smart this time. I’ll try to elaborate in detail every new feature I’ve noticed up to this moment.

wp27-stick_post Dashboard is the same old one, but once you enter Write page to create a new post, on the right panel you’ll notice a new checkbox which allows you to make a post sticky. This way, your particularly chosen post will remain on top of your blog posts, even if you’ve published something new after it. It comes into good use I can say.

Now, after you’ve typed some words and feel satisfied with your article, you hit publish. WordPress will automatically take you back to the Manage page, and not stick you to a new blank Write page. This is another good change they did, because, honestly the old 2.6 way sucked.

But this is not all that is so cool about WordPress 2.7. I clicked page after page within the Admin Panel and comparing every options with the last 2.6.
While scrolling down on the Settings –> Miscellaneous page, plenty of Image Sizing options are obvious in first glance.
4 rows are newly available with different possibilities, giving you a chance to manipulate your images.
wp27-img_options Yaay, pretty welcomed! Note: in the image above the default options are shown.

Is there more? Sure there is, maybe even the most amazing thing that has been done so far.

“You can find additional plugins for your site by using the new Plugin Browser/Installer functionality.”

wp27-plugins

On the Plugins page, you now have the option to Install Plugins from within WordPress Admin Panel.
You can Search, Upload, check for Featured, Popular, Newest and Recently Updated Plug-ins. At this development stage of WordPress 2.7 the above listed functions made bold do not actually work. This is excellent addition to WordPress I think. It’ll very noticeably shorten ones needed time to customize his/her blog with additional functionality added by plug-ins. Excellent new feature!

Finally, there’s one more change I’ve noticed in the Users page but it’s trivial comparing to the above described feature, hence I’ll skip it.

I really hope they consider implementing an option to upgrade WordPress automatically, it’ll ease our job in no time, but no can force them to do so. Despite all, WordPress 2.7 is not a major update but a smooth and nice overcome to this excellent blogging system.

If you want to get dirty a little too exploring WordPress 2.7 your self just visit the WordPress Track site, scroll down to the end of the page, find the part where it says Download in other formats and click Zip Archive, the download will automatically start. From then I assume you know what to do :).

Gosh! I never thought I’m going to type this much. That’s it then, enjoy what’s about to come and have fun exploring the depths (not literally). Cheers.