Boredworkers.com

Wordpress 2.1 codenamed Ella is available for public consumption. Check out the full release features before deciding whether or not to upgrade.

Among some of the more interesting features is the autosave functionality. At present, unless you’re using Firefox 2.x which has session data, you’ll lose any unsaved posts if your browser (or worse, your OS) crashes mid-post. From my understanding, the autosave feature will save posts intermitently much like most major wordprocessors on the market. This is a great value added feature as it will save alot grief for alot of people. I haven’t upgraded my browser at home and it crashed on me after I had nearly completed a 1000 word article. Wish I had this feature last weekend.

Number two on my list of value added features is the lossless XML import and export. I’ve been thinking about consolidating the Bangkok spinoff into the main Boredworkers.com blog. This feature will come in handy to that end. It also helps if you decide to move away from Wordpress.com to your own domain (provided they install and enable this feature on that domain).

On the developer side, there’s a pseudo cron-job feature that allows tasks to be scheduled ala cron. Useful if you require scheduled tasks. Not sure how it works but it is worth exploring for some of the personal projects that I’m working on. Particularly useful for plugins that previously relied on the crontab to run its tasks. This pseudo cron would allow them to be independant of the server admin.

There are many other features but they seem secondary to my current practical use of Wordpress. Might explore them more in the near future to see how well they work for me. One interesting feature listed was:

You can set any “page” to be the front page of your site, and put the latest posts somewhere else, making it much easier to use WordPress as a content management system.
- Wordpress 2.1 Ella -

Interesting indeed. Wordpress is already a feature rich and highly customisable platform (plugins, themes, etc). This new feature might come in handy and further strengthen Wordpress’ ability to handle backend for more extensive projects.

I’ll reserve futher comment until I’ve explored the new release further. Will I port over? Not immediately. I’m too comfortable with the current version to make the move. No doubt I will install it on one of the lesser subdomains to see how it works. With so many new features, I expect there to be a bughunt and a possible patch not too long down the road.

If you’re interested and can trouble shoot your own Wordpress install, then this is just up your alley. Go download it and help out by reporting any bugs that you might run across. Cheers.