WordPress 2.7: Great new interface!

I’ve been trying out the WordPress 2.7 nightly builds for some time now. WordPress 2.7 just entered into a feature freeze state. The new UI (user interface) is soooo so georgeous that it’s going to be a pain to wait for the release date.

You should see what Matt, Ryan and the WordPress guys have done. It looks like I can postpone having to buy a 22-inch monitor (but I probably doubt that for wanting a bigger screen). Here’s a quote from Jane of the WordPress Devt Team on the WordPress development blog on how they plan to do it:

… screens just to access sub-navigation menus; we wanted the most-used screens to be within a click or two at most. If you’ve been using the nightly builds, you got used to the arrow controls that allowed you to expand and contract the menus. Then you got used to the box-style with icons that not only opened and closed vertically, but could be minimized horizontally as well, leaving a remnant of icons to provide a kind of “advanced mode,” …

And a screen shot of the “add new” post screen:

It’s beautiful! What’s also great is that the menu on the left can be collapsed to just mere icons! Minimizing the screen area occupied by the menus (great guys)!

Here’s how it looks like when the menus are collapsed. Pls note that the UI is not yet updated on the svn repository so they’re a bit different.

Look at those icons which simply occupies the minimum amount of space. I love the “hover” feature that they’ve done to minimize the number of clicks to get to a function.

I wish they’d implement a “hover feature” for the “accordion” styled Publish, Tags and Categories boxes on the right. It would really, really help users from having to click on the boxes to expand or collapse them.

But the UI is not just the only thing you’d expect in the new version. Some of the new features are:

• XMLRPC Comments API – this is exciting because it’s a step forward into remotely managing comments
• Keyboard shortcuts for comment moderation – navigation just got better
• Sticky Posts – wow! looks like sticky posts is getting into the core, no more need for installing plugins
• Theme update api, like we do for plugins – themes can now be easily updated just like plugins
• Dashboard and write box rearranging – it would be cool if the dashboard would turn into something like iGoogle!
• One-click plugin installs
• Reply to comments from admin – makes life easier for “bloggers”

Also worth noting is what they’ve done to make administration easier by including “quick edits” of meta data without having to open up the WordPress edit page — something similar to cool Admin Management Extended plugin created by Oliver

One thing I notice is that the “Media Manager“, I talked about, on the right hand side disappeared. I still would love to see it there plus having a framework to expand features to handle images (e.g. cropping images). Well, hope it gets into a future release.

This is an exciting version with usability features really getting into the core which will make using WordPress a lot easier (not that it’s already very easy to use it).

Don’t you just love using WordPress. Thanks and great job guys!