Dashboard at a glance

Besides the new layout, there are other changes obvious in the first 5 minutes:

• A new “Quick Press” section – I-’m writing- started writing this post using it.
• Ajaxy accordion widgets replace the top-nav sections in the new sidebar menu.
• Sidebar can be minimized a la photoshop toolbar – child items pop-out on hover.
• Totally new(rockin’) icon set – apparently they had a contest – grats “BD”
• Did I mention the Ajax?? I don’t mean to be a web2.0 fanboy here – but honestly – UI design can make or break the experience…and unfortunately it’s more often breaking it.

No sooner than I say I’m not a web2.0 fanboy as I mentally say “Ooooeee!” upon noticing that the boxes can be repositioned via drag-and-drop. That’s, like, web2.0 meme numero uno.

Editing content

Viewing the list of my posts I noticed two things: An alternate view of posts that shows excerpts(just in case you don’t use the most descriptive titles), and the ability to “quick edit” the titles, categories, and a few other things about the post. Unfortunately you can’t edit the body of the post without clicking ‘edit’.

Revisions

This might have already been there – but revisions are great. At the bottom of the “Edit Post” page you get this:

Clicking one of the links takes you to a page showing the text of your post along with an array of radio buttons for all previous revisions and their restore links. Talk about handy.

Overall

I’m very very happy with the upgrade. I know WP updates don’t come with much fanfare – but this one was touted as having “major improvements”. I certainly think they came through.

There are some minor issues – browser related positioning errors and what-not – but I’d expect an official launch in the very near future.

Want what I have?

If you’d like to upgrade, you can just visit Tools>Update and get the “Nightly build”…Or, if you’re like me, and prefer to handle your upgrades with Subversion(it’s easier to go downgrade, faster to do multiple blogs, and simpler to merge your customizations with upstream code) – then you’d just ssh into your blog directory and…

If you are already tracking trunk(then you probably already know this):

svn update

OR

If you are tracking the latest stable version, but want to try the new stuff:

svn sw http://svn.automattic.com/wordpress/trunk/ .

If you hate it and want to switch back:

svn sw http://svn.automattic.com/wordpress/tags/2.6.3/ .

OR

If you don’t have a WP blog yet and want to get started with the latest stuff or don’t have anything in your media gallery worth keeping(you could always back that up) – and haven’t made any customizations to WP themes(again, you could always back those up). Basically if you don’t yet have your WP blog under revisioning, and need to get started with svn:

svn co http://svn.automattic.com/wordpress/trunk/ .

Enjoy!