WordPress 2.8 is rolling out today, and there are several features and enhancements I’m pretty excited about. They keep making my favorite content management tool better and better!

Theme Management Drastically Improved

We now have functionality similar to that of  plugin management. Now there’s no need to find a theme, download it to your home computer, unzip it, and FTP it to your site. Just search through your WordPress panel, pick the theme you want, and install it. They’ve also drastically improved the interface for previewing a new theme.

Improved widget management and use

Very cool. You can now use a widget in more than on place on your WordPress site. This allows you to change the settings each time you use it. Widget management is also much improved for sites with multiple sidebars. Now you can see all of your sidebars at once instead of having to switch back and forth.

Tag management

Tags always seemed sort of freeform and open to me, and you can still use them that way. But now you have the ability to add descriptions and change the slugs on your tags right in the admin panel. Great for those times when you want to have a slug that differs from the tag terminology  or to keep your tags and categories from stepping on each other’s toes.

There are some other cool features in the new release that make things like editing comments, auto-saving, and logging in (case insensitive) a little more handy to use. You can read about all the new features of WordPress 2.8 on the official site.

You should see the option to upgrade to 2.8 on your admin panel soon–remember, it’s automatic now. We’ll be on the lookout for bugs and irritations that may arise, and will patiently await the next release that addresses them!