Right on schedule, WordPress 2.8 “Baker” was released on June 10, 2008. Named after the legendary Chet Baker, 2.8 offers some substantial upgrades in the evolution of the WordPress blogging platform. Let’s take a quick look.

Admin Interface

As usual, a lot of the biggest changes occur in the management side of WordPress, starting right from the Dashboard. New features allow you to adjust the number of columns that appear, move content around and make other changes to personalize the Dashboard.

In WordPress 2.7, we got the ability to search the WordPress.org Plugins database and do an instant install from there. This functionality is now included in the themes area with an even better search feature. You can search by primary colors, number of columns, fixed versus flex width and then either preview or install right from there.

The widget interface has seen a major overhaul, including the ability to re-use core widgets (use the standard Links widget in more than one place for example), drag and drop from the widget list into any of the widget enabled areas, a “holder” area for placing widgets while trying out others that remembers your settings and more.

The ability to choose the number of columns and customize the layout is also a feature now on the Posts editor as well. One or two column choice lets you hide the right side options for a wider post editor and most areas can be rearranged to suit your needs.

Overall

The WordPress 2.8 has also dramatically improved the overall speed of WordPress with optimizations and also by compressing Javascript and CSS files for speedier transfer. This will make many of your readers happy.

Along with the visible changes the team at Automattic have apparently fixed nearly 800 bugs from the previous version!

This video provides a quick presentation of the new features found in WordPress 2.8 “Baker”

Effective immediately, all WordPress installations done by InstalledForYou will be installed with WordPress 2.8 unless you request to remain on the 2.7 version. Leave me any comments or questions below and I’ll answer you as soon as I can.

Update: This site was updated to WordPress 2.8 just after the original post. The upgrade was smooth and easy using the built-in tool, and the new features and improvements are immediately noticable.