The hard-working WordPress team has just released the latest upgrade to their increasingly-popular content management system. WordPress 2.8 “Baker” has been named after noted trumpeter and vocalist Chet Baker. The release is being called a “fit and finish” release for WordPress with improvements to themes, widgets, taxonomies, and overall speed. They’ve also fixed over 790 bugs.

Visually, 2.8 looks and feels a lot like 2.7, with just minor tweaks here and there. But once you dig in, you’ll begin to notice more changes.

Major changes and rewrites under the hood to the styles and scripting have made 2.8 noticeably faster. You should notice significantly better response times while navigating the admin area.

The built-in plugin updater has been such a success, they’ve now added the same functionality to themes. You can now browse the entire theme directory and install a theme with one click from the comfort of your WordPress dashboard.

If you make edits or tweaks to themes or plugins from your dashboard, you’ll appreciate the new CodePress editor which gives syntax highlighting to the previously-plain editor. There is now contextual documentation for the functions in the file you’re editing linked right below the editor.

If you were ever frustrated with sidebar widgets before, this release should offer great relief. The widgets interface has been completely redesigned, enabling you to do things like edit widgets on the fly, have multiple copies of the same widget, drag and drop widgets between sidebars, and save inactive widgets so you don’t lose all their settings. (Yeah!)

Finally you should explore the new Screen Options on every page. It’s the tab in the top right. If you have a wide monitor, you can choose to display one, two, three, or four columns of widgets in your dashboard, instead of the two it has by default. On other pages you can change how many items show per page.

Check out the full list of over 180 new features, changes, upgrades, and improvements on the WordPress Codex. The list is exhausting!

Overall, you should be able to upgrade to version 2.8 without major disruptions to your current theme, but you’ll enjoy a much faster, and even more flexible interface than ever before. Keep up the great work, WordPress!

Comments? Questions?