Login
Sign In or Register
Not Registered Yet?
Join Now! It's FREE. Get full access and benefit from this site
Join Now! It's FREE. Get full access and benefit from this site
Friday, 19 June 2009 23:05
It’s a great achievement for WordPress 2.8 to be released so soon after 2.7. Named ‘Baker’, 2.8 adds plenty of new features, including syntax highlighting for theme/plugin editing, a theme installer, and a great revamped widgets interface and API.
You can now sort your dashboard into columns, which is a great feature for those who are small or large on screen space. You can set up to 4 columns and drag and drop different widgets. I found it to be a good feature as I like re-arrange my dashboard and management pages to suit my workspace. This will surely appeal to many users.
Just installed WordPress? This is the feature for those that forget to change their admin account password after a fresh install. It displays a big notice across the top of the admin area until you change it.
In WordPress 2.7, you could install plugins directly through your installation. Now, the same feature has been ported to themes, allowing you to install any theme directory into your WordPress site. Installing is as easy as installing plugins — through the click of a button.
This is a feature that I’ve been looking forward to, along with many other developers. WordPress now has syntax highlighting thanks to CodePress. This means you can find functions and browse through code much easier, as you would with your code editor.
You’ll also find a Documentation lookup, as so you can quickly reference WordPress functions through the Codex. These new features will speed up development of WordPress themes even further by having the tools right in front of you for quick & easy access.
WordPress’ widgets management interface was a bit plain and simple. That’s no longer true with the brand new widgets interface allowing you to sort and manage your theme’s widgets more efficiently. It still uses the drag and drop method of adding/removing widgets, but takes the active/inactive widgets one step further separating them from each other.
Creating widgets is now easier than ever before with the new widgets API. All you have to do is extend the basic class and functions, and you can easily create a widget with options and more. Here’s an example widget using the new API; it’s been coded to allow the user to set the title, but display predefined content.
<?php
/*
Plugin Name: Example Widget
Plugin URI:
Description: An example widget using the WordPress 2.8 Widget API.
Version: 1.0.0
Author: Andrew Turner
Author URI: http://andrew-turner.com
*/
class exWidget extends WP_Widget {
/* Constructs Widget */
function exWidget() {
parent::WP_Widget(false, $name = 'exWidget');
}
/* Widget Base */
function widget($args, $instance) {
extract( $args );
?>
<?php echo $before_widget; ?>
<?php echo $before_title
. $instance['title']
. $after_title; ?>
<?php echo 'Hello There!' ?>
<?php echo $after_widget; ?>
<?php
}
function update($new_instance, $old_instance) {
return $new_instance;
}
/* Options Form */
function form($instance) {
$title = esc_attr($instance['title']);
?>
<p><label for="<?php echo $this->get_field_id('title'); ?>"><?php _e('Title:'); ?> <input class="widefat" id="<?php echo $this->get_field_id('title'); ?>" name="<?php echo $this->get_field_name('title'); ?>" type="text" value="<?php echo $title; ?>" /></label></p>
<?php
}
}
/* Register Widget */
add_action('widgets_init', create_function('', 'return register_widget("exWidget");'));
?>
WordPress now supports timezones, and the ability to automatically update when it comes around to daylight savings. This is a new feature, and was not found in previous versions.
A Taxonomy is essentially a way that things are grouped or divided. WordPress 2.8 improves upon its Taxonomies by allowing you to develop your own. By default, WordPress includes three of its own.
Uses for custom taxonomies might include making post series or more. Here’s an example of creating a custom taxonomy, the code is placed in your theme’s functions.php file.
<?php
add_action( 'init', 'custom_taxonomies', 0 );
function custom_taxonomies() {
register_taxonomy( 'version', 'post', array( 'hierarchical' => false, 'label' => 'Version', 'query_var' => true, 'rewrite' => true ) );
register_taxonomy( 'released', 'post', array( 'hierarchical' => true, 'label' => 'Released', 'query_var' => true, 'rewrite' => true ) );
register_taxonomy( 'downloads', 'post', array( 'hierarchical' => false, 'label' => 'Downloads', 'query_var' => true, 'rewrite' => true ) );
}
?>
To understand how to create your own taxonomy, you need to understand what’s behind the code. Here’s a breakdown of the following example:
register_taxonomy( 'version', 'post', array( 'hierarchical' => false, 'label' => 'Version', 'query_var' => true, 'rewrite' => true ) );
The WordPress team have sped up the administration pages (E.g: Posts, Comments, Settings, etc) through script compression and concatenation. Now, you can perform tasks quicker and easier. Take note of the fact that this feature doesn’t apply to the front end of your WordPress website.
The plugin management interface that allows you to activate and deactivate plugins has been updated with a new layout - it still heralds the same features as in WordPress 2.7, but with a different layout. You’ll find that they’ve been put together in a list on the single page, but there’s an option to view different statuses such as:
WordPress 2.8 brings some great new features to the table - some major and others minor - but they’re changes that make using WordPress more efficient, convenient and reliable. Keep an eye out for WordPress 2.9 and beyond as it evolves into what could be one of the best Content-Management-Systems available!
