General rants and ravings, the visual diary of Nigel Evans.

The last few weeks have been a buzz on the Internet with the release of WordPress 2.8.3. If you have a WordPress blog or site, you’ve probably seen a notification at the top if you haven’t already upgraded. If you’re not the site administrator of your blog, you can click the top of the blog to notify them.
The upgrade to WordPress 2.8 has brought many needed changes, although it has already brought with it some bugs, as in a few short weeks, there’s already been a couple security updates. So if you haven’t done so, make sure you have WordPress 2.8.3.
You’ll notice some of the upgrades in 2.8 as soon as you login. One of the best features is some of the new functionality on the dashboard. You can now easily add and move widgets around on your blog with the new widget interface. Simply click and move which widgets you want to add or remove from your sidebar.

For more basic users, one of the best new features is the ability to add templates from the administrator pane. Simply go to the appearance section on the administrator side bar and choose to add new themes.

Now you can either search for themes in the WordPress database or upload ones that you’ve downloaded to your computer.

Although it’s usually not the most important feature of a blog, comments have often been the most talked about feature of WordPress. With WordPress 2.8, you can now better manage your comments. Below, you notice that with a click of the button you can easily delete, reply to, unapprove and edit comments.

These are some of the biggest new features to 2.8, although there is a long list of other features. Some of the other upgrades include per page options for plugins, use of “custom header” for menu text, allow editing of plugin files, syntax highlighting and much more.