At the end of 2008 I wrote about the launch of Wordpress 2.7. The 2.7 version provided a brand new administration interface plus a variety of other changes.Today an announcement was posted on the Wordpress blog about the beta release of the 2.8 version of Wordpress. Here's a partial list of some of the major updates that can be found in the 2.8 release:

• New Theme Installer routines
• Separate Comments into a separate postbox, from Discussion postbox, on the Edit Post screen
• Don't ask for confirmation when marking a comment as spam
• Don't notify post author of own comments
• Improved Admin icons
• Allow editing of all plugin files (Ticket 6732)
• Improved Plugin search
• Autosave post/page when pressing Control/Command+S
• Add description field for tags
• Enforce unique email addresses in Add/Edit users
• Make user_nicenames unique during registration
• Add "Send this password to the new user by email"

I am looking forward to the tag description field as it helps with search engine optimization and was something I utilized when my sites were using Drupal. What I'd like to see Wordpress add is a dashboard that allows for multiple blog administration. While there is the MU version of Wordpress, there would still be a benefit for allowing multiple blogs to be administered together or to switch between sites from one admin interface.

Another new feature in Wordpress 2.8 is the Widgets API. Wordpress describes the API (technical name: WP_Widget) as, "a class that abstracts away much of the complexity involved in writing a widget, especially multi-widgets." There were also a number of other updates to the loading functions along with plugins and theme updates. The Wordpress team notes that database performance has been improved - this is a good thing as I've found my server usage double since moving from Drupal to Wordpress.

Always remember that beta software can be, and usually is, filled with bugs. Proceed with caution if you plan to install the beta on your live blog.