Matthew Mullenweg announced at Wordpress.org that Wordpress 2.1 “Ella” is available for download. Here at Like that Idea we found the upgrade to be no more or no less difficult than past Wordpress upgrades. It’s too early to tell, but there does appear to be a performance improvement attibuted to one of the changes in Wordpress 2.1.

Much more efficient database code, faster than previous versions. Domas Mituzas from MySQL went over all our queries with a fine-toothed comb.

I wish more coders of content management systems would get the “database experts” involved in reviewing how well or not so well their project is utilizing the database. We did however run into a problem with one of the new features included in Wordpress 2.1.

A tabbed editor that allows you to switch between WYSIWYG and code editing instantly while writing a post.

The problem? After the upgrade, the editor contained neither the tabs nor the WYSIWYG editor. I figure there must be a way to toggle on the editor but found there is no option if you go through the administrative “Users > Authors & Users” to edit the name. What’s going on? Well it looks as if you can only toggle on this feature by editing your own profile thorugh your own profile by either going to “My Profile” or “Users > Your Profile”. No big deal, but it just wasn’t intuititve enough for me.

Additional new features and changes listed in this version of Wordpress that I think I will like include:

• Autosave makes sure you never lose a post again. I’m a habitual browser closer before saving my work…so this will be a big one for for me! So far I’ve found this works very well.
• The lossless XML import and export makes it easy for you to move your content between WordPress blogs.
• 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.
• Much more efficient database code, faster than previous versions. Domas Mituzas from MySQL went over all our queries with a fine-toothed comb.
• Pages can now be drafts, or private.
• Comment feeds now include all the comments, not just the last 10.
• A new version of the Akismet plugin is bundled.

Developers are also expected to like the cleaner code, API improvements, and a number of other improvements since Wordpress 2.0 was released. Most of these improvements should especially help in Wordpress plugin development.

References:

1. Original Announcement
2. Download Page for Wordpress 2.1 at Wordpress.org