BlogsWeek.com

Quoting Matt Muellenweg: “On behalf of the WordPress.org community of committers, contributers, and volunteers, I’m very proud to announce the immediate availability of WordPress 2.1 “Ella”, named for jazz vocalist Ella Fitzgerald.”

A sample of what’s in the new version:

* Autosave makes sure you never lose a post again.
* New tabbed editor allows you to switch between WYSIWYG and code editing instantly while writing a post.
* 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.

“Developers will especially love this release, as it has much cleaner code than 2.0 and includes hundreds of enhancements that will enable a new generation of richer plugins.”

Here’s a taste of some of the things included:

* Pseudo-cron functionality lets you schedule events much like cron.
* The javascript loader makes it easier for plugins to include rich functionality.
* Tons of new hooks and APIs.
* We’ve started to fill out our code inline documentation.
* Image and thumbnail API allows for richer media plugins.
* Custom header, color picker, and image cropping framework.

WordPress 2.1 also includes over 550 bug fixes.

For full details, and a glimpse on the WordPress future, please read the release announcement.