Nathan Waters

… Well, nearly. But it’s only a few days away now (supposed to be released on Dec 26th US time, which means Dec 27th AUS time)

A couple of the new features look very promising, and you can bet within hours of it’s release I’ll be updating to the latest version and hoping everything still works as it should

Darren Rowse over at ProBlogger.net posted an interesting article, 10 Things You Should Know about WordPress 2.0.

The “10 Things” in brief include:

1) Thumbnails of Downloaded Themes: Allowing small screenshots of installed themes to be viewed in the Admin themes panel
2) Capabilities and Roles: A new and improved permission system for users
3) Importing from Other Blogging Platforms: It’s now easier to move from other blogging platforms to WordPress, including a wide variety of new options such as importing from an RSS feed.
4) Built In Caching: WordPress can now cache posts and settings much the same as web browsers do with temporary internet files
5) Image Uploading: More options for uploading image files for your posts
6) Use WordPress for Social Networking: XFN (XHTML Friends Network) allows for more options in establishing the connection between yourself and a link to another website such as another blog/blogger
7) Hooks and Filters: More options and resources for plugin developers
Built in Anti-Spam: WordPress now comes with built in anti-spam plugin, Akismet, to help eradicate comment spam
9) Don’t Use the Rich Text Editor: WordPress 2.0 includes TinyMCE, a javascript Rich Text Editor which makes writing posts online more like an offline experience with such things as common shortcut keys like Ctrl-B for Bold, Ctrl-I for Italics, etc. However Darren says that currently TinyMCE generates what is sometimes known as “dirty code” such as empty tags and the like. I think it’s at least a start in the right direction to make blogging a more user-friendly experience, and I’m sure in the near future we’ll be seeing WordPress incorporating an online blog posting application which will be very similar to desktop word processors such as Microsoft Word.
10) WordPress as a Content Management System: WordPress is becoming easier to use as more than just a blogging platform, but also as a complete CMS for your website

There’s some more listed features over at Asymptomatic.net

Nathan Waters
WP 2.0… Bring it!