WordPress 2.7 final has been released, and I’ve upgraded the Gardens! No problems so far, although I haven’t checked all the plugins. Theme Switcher Reloaded doesn’t work as it should, unfortunately, but I’m sure that will be fixed soon.

To celebrate, I’m releasing a new theme – Daisy Gray. It’s a fixed-width (750 pixels), two-column theme with a right sidebar, in white and shades of gray, with a two-level tabbed page menu. As with all the Garden’s themes, Daisy Gray is coded to be very search engine friendly. I just submitted it to WordPress.org today, and it will take a few days to be approved, but if you want it now, just drop me a line either here in comments or at the Contact page.

The first release candidate for 2.7 is out, and I’ve installed it on my dev server for testing. So far, so good! Also out soon is SimplePress forum’s new version, so it looks like I’m going to have a busy holiday.

As soon as the final version is released, I’ll be releasing the updates for Coronado, Green Apples, and Tickled Pink themes for WordPress 2.7, and have a fresh theme in the works. I’ve completed the Photoshop and template and am piecing it together with 2.7RC1.

On all themes, comment layout will change, to a more aesthetically pleasing look for the threaded comments.

On backwards-compatibility: Security demands that you keep your software updated. If you want 2.6 versions of the three themes already released, download them now. All themes from the Gardens will be for the latest version(s) of WordPress, which will soon be 2.7.

The pre-2.7 version of Coronado has been released and is available for download at WordPress.org.

Demo link

There are some necessary changes to be made to the Garden’s themes when version 2.7 of WordPress is released. I haven’t yet decided if I will make the themes backwards-compatible or not, but am leaning towards not. So if you want to have 2.6.xx versions of our themes, download them now – the compatible versions will be released as soon as WordPress 2.7 debuts.

I just installed WordPress’ latest trunk version of 2.7 and this post is about my first impression. It’s a good one! The back end is much more usable and tidy, with pages and posts under separate headers – crucial for someone like me – with the current backend, I almost always write a post when I mean to write a page. Most of the sections organized in a left sidebar. On the right are the publsh buttons, categories, tags and media.

I’ll post more later after I play around with it a bit. I want to dive into the comments API for one.

So far, my opinion  is that WordPress hit a home run with the admin interface in this version. I think it corrects any problems one might have had since the 2.5 interface was released.

Five flowers for you, WordPress!

I’m a couple of weeks behind on this news, but it was news to me! I’ve been sick and out of the loop these past weeks, and only just read the list of features planned for WordPress 2.7, due to be released as soon as the end of 2008. I’ll be keeping a close eye out, and will probably jump in and beta test as I did with the 2.5 release.

From Weblog Tools Collection:

Here is a list of features that will be introduced into WordPress 2.7:

• Comments API – This according to me is the most exciting feature, it will allow developers to create offline integration of comments management, where users could use desktop clients to manage comments (moderate, edit, reply, delete, spam, unspam).
• Keyboard shortcuts for comment moderation – This feature will help users to quickly moderate comments using keyboard shortucts, so you can expect key combinations like Ctrl + S to spam a comment, Ctrl + A to approve and so on.
• Theme Update API – WordPress 2.5 and above have really made plugin management quite easy, you automatically receive notices when a new update to a plugin is available and can upgrade it without having to manually upload it to your FTP server. With this addition WordPress aims to bridge the gap between theme developers and the users for publishing updates to themes.
• One Click Plugin Installs – Installing a plugin will be much easier with One click plugin installs. A plugin with similar features called One Click Plugin was the winner of the Plugin Competition last year.
• WordPress core updates – This is a feature many users have been waiting for, with core updates you can easily upgrade your WordPress versions. The WordPress Automatic Upgrade plugin performs the same task.
• Default Sitemaps – WordPress 2.7 will include a default sitemap creator, which will create Google XML sitemaps for your blog. Google Sitemaps Generator plugin is the best option available right now for creating XML sitemaps.
• Admin Panel Comment Replies – This plugin will help administrators to reply to comments using the admin panel. There are several plugins which allow you to do so right now, including WP AJax Edit Comments, Better Comments Manager and Absolute Comments.
• Comment Threading – This feature will allow users to reply to other commentators in a threaded manner, where replied comments will display below the actual comment, WordPress already has the ability to scale to accomodate threaded comments, without requiring database changes. Brian’s Threaded Comments is a does the job of allowing users to reply to comments.
• Subscribe to Comments – The WordPress team is also planning to include a option to allow commentators to subscribe to follow up comments, but this is marked as a question, so it may not actully make it into WordPress 2.7. The Subscribe to Comments plugin does the job to notify commentators on follow up comments.
• Widgets for Dashboard and Write Box – This feature will allow users to re-arrange the widgets on the dashboard and write page to suit their preferences.
• Batch Editing of Posts – This feature will allow users to batch edit their posts. Though there is not much information available about this right now, and I could not really find more from my research on the topic.

It’s going to be a fun winter!