Enjoying WordPress 2.7 Almost Beta

I’ve been running my various sites and our latest demo site on the nightly builds of WordPress 2.7 to get used to 2.7 to field the myriad of questions that are sure to come my way when the upgrade goes final. It looks like it is almost time to start recording my video tutorials for basic WP usage, but I think I’ll hold off for a full beta/release-candidate version in case any visuals or layout items change.

Here’s my take on 2.7 so far, including some nice screenshots. This was written with 2.7-almost-beta-9300, by the way, so we’ll see if I encounter any problems.

My initial impression was a simple, “whoa… that’s different!” Of course, Matt has been saying that the update is, in large part, for improving navigation and usability by eliminating unnecessary clicking to get to the screens you need. We are far too familiar with waiting for the Design page to load and then clicking Theme Editor to get anything done.

They have accomplished this massive improvement by creating a vertical menu on the left side that can either be represented by icons or words that collapse and expand to display the dashboard link without refreshing the dashboard. You can even hover over the menu and still right-click or command-click to open the page in a new tab or window.

Did you ever think the main dashboard page was too busy? You can hide areas with a Page Options link at the top to display the minimum items that you want. I didn’t notice any compatibility issues with my myriad of plugins, though I did discover one popular slideshow plugin had problems, but I’ve notified the author of that.

UPDATE: Since I began writing this post, WP 2.6.3 released.