It’s been a long time coming, but recently we saw the release of the latest version of Wordpress, and so far I am impressed. This particular site is now using this latest version and aside form a couple of bugs I found it seems to work well. Hopefully the bugs can be worked out and a maintenance release will be available, but I want to focus on the new features with this post.
Theme Installer
For quite a while now Wordpress has had a wonderful tool for finding and installing plugins in Wordpress, but themes was a different story. Though the Wordpress.org web site listed hundreds of great themes, the only way to get them to work for your site was to download a zip file then upload the files to your web server. If you didn’t know how to use FTP or open a zip file, you could really be lost with this. I have seen quite a few sites running Wordpress that are using the classic them included with the Wordpress software.
This changes with Wordpress 2.8 with the addition of the “Add New Themes” tool that is built into the software. When you click on the option, you get a screen similar to the one on the right (click to enlarge) where you can search for themes with specific keywords, or select from a variety of options (tags) to find a theme. With the hundreds of themes already available you are certain to find one you can use.
When you search for a keyword, or by tag, or use either the “Featured” or “Newest” options on the “Add New Themes” page you will be presented with a list of themes to choose from. You can preview the themes before you install them, but be warned that the preview will have the sample data similar to what you see on the Wordpress.org web site. To see how it will look with your data, you will need to install the theme first. Don’t worry, just installing won’t change your site, you still need to activate it.
Once you find one you want to try, click on the install link to install the theme. The pop up window that shows up is a bit confusing at first as you have to scroll the window down to find the button to install the theme. Once you do this the system will download and install the theme for you, then you can preview it with your content or activate the theme on your site. If you don’t like the look of the theme once it’s installed, you can easily delete the theme from the Appearance page.
This feature will really make it easier for people to apply different themes to their site. The fine people at Wordpress even included a link to upload themes on this new section so that theme developers can easily share their themes from inside their own site.
There are quite a few other great new features that I want to talk about, but we’ll wait for tomorrow to post those. Let me get a chance to check them out before I tell you all about them. If you want more information on all the wonderful new features of Wordpress 2.8, you can check the official announcement or the codex page.
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This 2.8 upgrade include database upgrade, i got my database covered yesterday:(
Great Postthanks (Why i cant subscribe to your fee? i keep getting an error)
I am not sure what you mean by “can’t subscribe to your fee” since there is no fee to subscribe here. Of course, if you want to pay me I would never turn that down.
Great post!
This is interesting infomation. I like the blog.