Design Bit blog by Anthony Brewitt - a web designer, blog designer, Wordpress designer and marketing philosopher. Designbit showcases Anthony’s talents and shares his web design know-how.

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WordPress “Ella”

February 7th, 2007, Category: Wordpress News

I just wanted to highlight the latest release of blog and publishing extraordinaire WordPress to the public; Ella 2.1, Named after the famous Jazzer Ella Fitzgerald. I think its a great update and my website installation / upgrade was flawless. There’s some extra features added and some major holes in PHP that have been plugged.

Backin up

WordPress finally has an easy way of backing up from one WordPress blog to another or just to backup to your PC, the simple XML backup is a massive improvement and makes backing up almost a one step process. They call it their WordPress eXtended RSS or WXR, and it will backup the usual posts, comments etc, including your custom fields. What i like the most about this feature is the simple usability of the function a simple export to backup to your PC and a import to bring the backup back into WordPress.

Saving me

As I write this post my favourite WordPress change is automatically in full flow, this post has just been saved meaning I will not lose my work as often as I used to. A tiny bit of text has just informed me that this post is being saved, and then after the message displays when the post was last saved. Fabulous!

WordPress as a CMS

We are new a step further to everybody else realising that WordPress truly can be used as a CMS, a new feature that means any page or post can be used as the homepage of your blog this empowers users to be able to have endless options as to what appears on their homepage, with little coding knowledge. Before this function I used a plugin for this functionality and I always like it when my plugin reliance depreciates.

Dashboard GUI

The dashboard and the GUI has had some small changes too, mainly a few changes to the color and menu system which seem to emphasize on importance of the different sections a little more potently, you ll also notice little changes like the the old links manager has been replaced with a blogroll section, and also that the blogroll section is now a category, empowering your links with extra features as well as the option to import links from another blog.

Upload Heaven

The new uploads section is bliss, If you upload an image you can re size it display it with all kinds of options including whether you want the image t link to a page or be a thumbnail linking to a larger image all inside the GUI. Once you have a few uploads there is also a much easier to organize uploads section too.

WP Conclude

I have most definitely missed a few nice new features but the ones outlined are the obvious big changes to me, So what you waiting for get it downloaded!

  • http://green-beast.com/ Mike Cherim

    I wish I could upgrade. I can’t as I don’t have the right MySQL version at this time. There are two features in WP 2.1 I want but I guess I’ll have to wait.

  • http://blue-anvil.com/ Mike Jolley

    So far I really like it, apart from the fact my backups wont import properly so Im having to manually import everything to my new host :(

    “a new feature that means any page or post can be used as the homepage of your blog”

    This was simple to do anyway, but I guess it makes it more clear!

  • Anthony

    @Mike C: Shame about the wait, some of these features are great and finally the backing up is easy!
    @Mike J: “Finally the backing up is easy!” and I really like this homepage feature, its an easy way to put anything you wont on your homepage, good for marketing I imagine.

  • http://www.umbrellawebsitedesign.co.uk/ website design guru

    i installed wordpress a few weeks ago i wonder if i will have the new version if anyone know would be great to know