The new release of WordPress looks pretty exciting. I haven’t made the move yet, so I can’t comment on that user experience (although Dan did run into one catch that is likely to cause some grief for people who have customized their sites currently).
Just looking at what’s changed, though, there are some very promising new features from a development point of view:
- “Widgets” are now included in the core system: Even though this is actually the cause of Dan’s frustration (mentioned above), in the end I think it’s an excellent decision. That kind of feature really should be in the core system, because there should be one standard pattern for widgets that plugin authors can write code to support. Up until now, I (and I’m sure many other plugin authors) frequently get asked for support for some of my plugins that I have designed to work as “widgets”, based on the original widget plugin by Automattic. It often turns out that the user is using some other variation of “widgets”, and it makes it very difficult to support them.
- PHPMailer for e-mail: This one probably actually isn’t too big a deal for most regular users, but it does bring much nicer mail functionality into WordPress that can be capitalized on and used by plugin authors. WPMU has actually had this since 1.1, so it’s good to see it moving in to the standard user version as well.
- jQuery: jQuery is a javascript library that makes writing javascript code easier and more consistent. It’s similar in purpose and in features to Prototype, which WordPress has included for quite some time, but it’s good to see that they’re now including both. They aren’t using it for much yet in 2.2, but since it’s there it’s available for you to reference if there’s a situation (or personal preference) that calls for it rather than Prototype.
There are lot of other changes, including ones that usually accompany every major release: performance improvements, additional plugin hooks (my personal favorite), etc. All in all, this release seemed to be very focused on making developers happy, which I applaud.