September 13, 2008

I’ve been pretty scathing about some aspects of WordPress over the past few weeks both here and in the comments of a few other blogs. That being the case I thought it was about time I wrote about some of the things that I really like about the current development version of WordPress; the version that will become 2.7 in the next few months.

Admin Stuff

There is a new option in each post screen that allows the uselss crap you never use to be removed, leaving only a nice clean interface. The fact that drag and drop is back also means that you can order what’s left to create a start to finish workflow (or should that be WordFlow?). My entire post screen now looks something like this:

It is also now possible to reply to comments from the admin panel. choosing to reply to a comment brings up a nice floating box for your well thought out reply.

It is finally possibly, god knows why this wasn’t always available, to upload files from the media manager instead of having to create a new post.

And lastly a new quick edit option allows some of the core settings of posts and pages to be altered from the manage page. These are settings such as the page title, slug, publication status, whether it can accept comments or trackbacks, as well as categories and tags.

Development Stuff

For a long time I have thought that WordPress was missing functionality when it comes to the site menu. Every theme has one and yet the controls for it are woeful. The new function wp_page_menu() will generate the HTML for the menu including customisable home page text (if you want the home page included), the option to specify a class, change a sort order or to get the result as a string instead of echoing it.

This is a step in a direction, but it is very basic and some might want more from it. As a basic theme template tag it is the right choice though. It fits in with the rest of the WordPress theme template tags in philosophy and output and will remove some of the development burden for theme authors that aren’t really familiar with PHP.

[php]
wp_page_menu('show_home=Home&menu_class=menu);


WordPress 2.7 will support threaded comments by default and with that comes a template tag to take the work out of outputing those comments.

[php]
wp_list_comments($comment);


This is interesting to me for a few reasons. Firstly it rolls up the default comment HTML into the function, so while you can overide this I think it is likely that it will mean less variation in the way comments are marked-up. Most people tend to copy the default theme anyway but some themes do vary alot. The second reason is that to overide the comment HTML you include a function name to call instead. This means that even if you want to use different HTML it may be best placed in the functions.php file or at least in a separate file that the functions.php calls as an include. Either way it helps to keep the templates cleaner.

I have already written about the plugin uninstall mechanism so I won’t go into that again but it is interesting. Back in the days of 2.3 there was a lot of interest in this, promted by an article on weblog tools collection, and my posts on the subject still recieve a fair degree of attention.

It goes without saying that things could change either a little or a lot before 2.7 comes out, and I am sure there is more to come. In the meantime I would to hear about the things that you are most looking foward to about 2.7. What is your favourite new features?