Download WordPress 2.8 Beta 1

[Eric B]

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For those of you who love to be on the cutting edge, you’ll be happy to learn that the Beta 1 version of WordPress 2.8 is now available for download. However WordPress 2.8 Beta 1 is suggest for testing purpose only and should not be deployed on your live blogs. Due to time constraint many features was left out of WordPress 2.7 and it was decided to get them in WordPress 2.8. Hence we may expect big changes as well as several new features in WordPress 2.8.

Features of WordPress Version 2.8

• New Theme Installer routines
• Add CodePress syntax highlighting to Theme and Plugin editors
• Add Documentation(function) lookup to Theme and Plugin editors
• Use "Custom Header" for menu text and revise Default theme to reflect change
• Separate Comments into a separate postbox, from Discussion postbox, on the Edit Post screen
• Make tags accessible without Javascript on the edit screen
• Don't ask for confirmation when marking a comment as spam
• Don't notify post author of own comments
• Fix comment paging for static front page
• Allow the dashboard widgets to be arranged in up to four columns as set via the Screen Options tab
• Make titles into links in Dashboard Right Now module (this was in 2.7.1)
• Improved Admin icons (grey-to-transparent shadows)
• Update Blue Admin Color Scheme
• Press This improvements UI, quoting fixes, plus ability for Contributors to use Press This
• Add a Cancel Upload button and a Delete link to Administration > Media > Add New
• Add column "Rating" in Administration > Links > Edit
• Improve installer to help people entering wrong email addresses
• Improved Widget user interface
• Allow editing of all plugin files (Ticket 6732)
• Improved Plugin search (this was in 2.7.1) on Administration > Plugins > Add New
• Per Page option for plugins
• Move "Install a plugin in .zip format" to new Upload tab under Administration > Plugins > Add New
• Show absolute date instead of relative date for scheduled posts
• Fix tags suggest for post quick edit and bulk edit
• Permalink editor changes and fix for pages
• Autosave post/page when pressing Control/Command+S
• Add toggle all button to the Gallery tab in the uploader
• Support more than one gallery on the same page
• Add per page option to Screen Options for comments, posts, pages, media, categories, and tags
• Overhaul of LiveJournal importer (also add define WP_IMPORTING)
• Import category descriptions for Administration > Tools > Import > WordPress
• Show Tools menu for all users so they can access Turbo
• Check for new version when visiting Administration > Tools > Upgrade
• In upgrade process, provide better explanation for database upgrade message
• Fix most popular link category list
• Add description field for tags
• WAI-ARIA landmark roles to added to WordPress Default theme
• "Choose a city in the same timezone as you" for Timezone in Administration > Settings > General
• Remove My Hacks option from Administration > Settings > Miscellaneous
• Hide email addresses from low privilege users on Administration > Comments
• Allow case-insensitive logins
• Enforce unique email addresses in Add/Edit users
• Make user_nicenames unique during registration
• Add "Send this password to the new user by email" option to Administration > Users > Add New
• Don't set user's Website url to http:// in Administration > Users > Add New
• Add password strength meter to Add User and Edit User
• Hide things that need to be available to screen readers via offscreen positioning
• Use invisible class for hiding labels and legends
• Use a semantic class name for text targeted to screen readers

Download WordPress Version 2.8

[Eric B]

As always, with these types of releases, we recommend you use it in a test environment, rather than using it on a live website/blog. It alerts you to change your default password a user logs in for the first time, "Send this password to the new user by email" option while creating a new user, detects duplicate e-mail addresses at the time of creating users, etc..To get started with WordPress, set it up on a web host for the most flexibility or get a free account on WordPress.com. WordPress is a powerful personal publishing platform, and it comes with a great set of features designed to make your experience as a publisher on the Internet as easy, pleasant and appealing as possible.

Development, Themes and Plugins

• Drop post_category column from wp_posts table, and link_category column from wp_links schemas
• Fix delete statements to ensure data integrity when innodb and foreign keys are used
• Enforce consistent ID types to allow for foreign keys to be defined between tables
• Add Sticky to list of post states
• Add a filter to the post states list
• Introduction and widespread use of transient and related fiters
• Add filters so AIM, Yahoo, and Jabber IM labels, in user profile, can be changed
• Add hook "after_db_upgrade"
• Add hooks for the Users, Categories, Link Categories, Tags and Comments table columns
• HTTP API updates and fixes
• Add support for blocking all outbound HTTP requests
• Updated List of HTTP status codes (Ticket 9297)
• Use SimplePie for widget and dashboard feeds
• llow other taxonomies (e.g. post categories) to be used with wp_tag_cloud (Changeset 10554)
• Add echo argument to wp_tag_cloud()
• Allow a plugin to control how many posts are displayed on edit pages
• Add "style" and "html" arguments to wp_list_authors (Ticket 4420)
• Add "exclude_tree" argument to wp_list_categories and make exclude behave like exclude_tree when hierarchical is specified--this was actually a 2.7.1 change
• Switch to using the ID when calling get_avatar internally to support caching plugins
• Allow plugins to provide a canonical redirect_url even if WordPress does not provide its own
• Drafts have post_date populated now, so look for a zeroed out post_date_gmt to determine non-scheduled nature

[chroma]

JS script loader Improvements

• jQuery 1.3.2
• Improvements to the script loader: allows plugins to queue scripts for the front end head and footer, adds hooks for server side caching of compressed scripts, adds support for ENFORCE_GZIP constant (deflate is used by default since it's faster)
• Load the minified versions of the scripts by default, define('SCRIPT_DEBUG', true); can be used to load the development versions
• Remove events from categories chechboxes in quick edit to speed up page unload
• Make simple form validation and ajax-add new categories compatible with jQuery 1.3.1
• Load farbtastic.js has to be loaded in the head