Announcing the arrival of the much anticipated WordPress 2.8!

What’s new in WordPress 2.8?

• New drag-and-drop widgets admin interface and new widgets API
• Syntax highlighting and function lookup built into plugin and theme editors
• Browse the theme directory and install themes from the admin
• Allow the dashboard widgets to be arranged in up to four columns
• Allow configuring the number of items to show on management pages with an option in Screen Options
• Support timezones and automatic daylight savings time adjustment
• Support IIS 7.0 URL Rewrite Module
• Faster loading of admin pages via script compression and concatenation

The release of 2.8 has many people in the blogosphere excited… But Why?

WordPress 2.8 looks very similar to 2.7 but the developers have really listened to what the community has been asking for, by making it faster to use and improving the ability to incorporate widgets, video and last but not least, easily select different themes!

That’s right, now you can browse a library of free themes directly from the WordPress Dashboard, and install it from there as well.

One of my favorite improvements in the 2.8 update, is the complete re-design of the widget interface. You can now drag and drop widgets and save there settings all in the Wordpress dashboard. This should cure most of the difficulty installing widgets.

To learn more about Wordpress 2.8 update you can visit the Wordpress.org development blog.

Here’s a quick video overview of everything in the new release: