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If you are like me who always keeps the version of WordPress installation on my personal blogs always updated, you may have probably updated your site to WordPress 2.7, aka Coltrane which became available awhile ago. Honestly, I just took the plunge without having read the update features. So I was a bit shock when I first login to my WP dashboard and thought I could have probably entered the wrong site. The WordPress 2.7 dashboard is totally different from previous releases of WordPress. And honestly, it was a great thing.

To sum up how different WordPress 2.7 from previous releases of the blogging software, founder Matt Mullenweg said:

The changes to WordPress in 2.5 and 2.7 were necessary for us to break free of much of the legacy cruft and interface bloat that had built up over the years (gradually) and more importantly provide us with a UI framework and interface language we can use at the foundation to build tomorrow’s WordPress on, to express ideas we haven’t been able to before. So at the end of 2009 I expect, interface-wise, WordPress to look largely the same as it does now.

Now on with the new features of the new WordPress 2.7 Release. Like I said, the first thing you’ll definitely notice is the new interface. It totally restructured the look and feel of the WordPress Dashboard. You’ll notice the difference as soon as you visit your http://…/wp-admin. The login box looks sleeker and dandier. The dashboard looks and feels like a webstart page similar to Netvibes, iGoogle and others. There are certainly more contents available now in the dashboard.

But aside from the new look and feel of the dashboard, you can now also customize the contents of the dashboard – that is remove, add, and rearrange items. If you’ve been using Widgets customization on your blog’s design, you would know what I mean.

When creating post, there is now an option for quick posting which is a miniature version of the actual WordPress post creation tool. If you want your posting area to occupy a larger space, you can do so with few clicks.

Another interesting new feature is a facility for making posts sticky, that is it will remain on your blog’s homepage until such time that you decide to make them “un-sticky”.

And the biggest announcement for all? Automatic updating of WordPress installation whenever a new version is officially released. Yup, no more manual downloading and installing of WordPress for us bloggers. This is a great new feature indeed.

So, have you update your WordPress installation? How do you like the new Interface so far?

You may get WordPress 2.7 here.

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