WordPress 2.7 Now Frozen

Ryan Boren, one of the lead developers of the WordPress.org project recently announced to the WP-Hackers mailing list that WordPress 2.7 is officially feature frozen. What does this mean? No more new features will be added into the core. The focus will now be on cleaning up the code, ensuring things work the way they are supposed to and then getting a beta out to the public to hammer out as many bugs as possible. According to Ryan, the visual design is not yet complete and there are still a few sections remaining that need some work such as the categories and tags screens.

I’ve personally set myself up to REALLY participate in this round of version testing as I have not contributed in this aspect of the project since I’ve started using the software. Here are the features in 2.7 that need testing:

• Core Upgrade
• Plugin Browsing/Installation
• Threaded Comments
• Comment Paging
• Back End Overall

For those of you wondering, here is what WordPress 2.7 looks like as of October 14, 2008. This look could and possibly will change before the official release.

A couple things to notice in this screenshot. The VIEW SITE link that used to display to the right of the blog title is now an image that resembles the same icon you would see in software menus in Windows. Also, take a look at the left hand navigation menu. Those double arrows can be used to either hide or show the menu enabling users to maximize their screen real estate if need be. The PAGE OPTIONS when clicked on slides open a window where you can select what to hide or show on the dashboard. For instance, if you don’t want to see QuickPress or the Recent Comments sections of the dashboard, simply de-select them.

This is a sample of what the comment moderation area looks like in 2.7. The QUICK EDIT link opens the comment editor inline which saves time editing comments. One other link worth noticing is the REPLY link. Similar to how the WP COMMENT REMIX plugin provides the ability to reply to comments from the backend, WordPress 2.7 will now have this functionality out of the box.

The WordPress theme repository has not yet made it into the core of WordPress. Considering 2.7 is under feature freeze, it looks like we won’t see that until possibly, WordPress 2.8. These two areas of WordPress are just samplings of what may be awaiting us come November 10th. (Tentative release date). If you’d like to take a look around and play with WordPress 2.7 before it’s initial release, check out the WordPress Demo site headed up by Chris Johnston. The site is reloaded every 15 minutes with a fresh install of the latest bleeding edge version of WordPress. Instead of installing it locally on your server or messing with subversion, you can use this demo and not have to worry about breaking something. Login information is as follows: Username: admin Password: demo. If you notice that the login information is not working, point your browser to http://wp.chrisjohnston.org/wp-admin/ and run the upgrade script. Then try logging in again.

Overall, I’m pretty stoked about WordPress 2.7, how about you?