(Copied from http://wordpress.org/development/2007/01/ella-21)
On behalf of the WordPress.org community of commiters, contributers, and volunteers, I’m very proud to announce the immediate availability of WordPress 2.1 “Ella”, named for jazz vocalist Ella Fitzgerald. Here’s a sampling of what’s in the new version:
- Autosave makes sure you never lose a post again.
- Our new tabbed editor allows you to switch between WYSIWYG and code editing instantly while writing a post.
- The lossless XML import and export makes it easy for you to move your content between WordPress blogs.
- Our completely redone visual editor also now includes spell checking.
- New search engine privacy option allows you take you to indicate your blog shouldn’t ping or be indexed by search engines like Google.
- 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.
- Links in your blogroll now support sub-categories and you can add categories on the fly.
- Redesigned login screen from the Shuttle project.
- More AJAX to make custom fields, moderation, deletions, and more
all faster. My favorite is the comments page, which new lets you
approve or unapprove things instantly.
- Pages can now be drafts, or private.
- Our admin has been refreshed to load faster and be more visually consistent.
- The dashboard now instantly and brings RSS feeds asynchronously in the background.
- Comment feeds now include all the comments, not just the last 10.
- Better internationalization and support for right-to-left languages.
- The upload manager lets you easily manage all your uploads pictures, video, and audio.
- A new version of the Akismet plugin is bundled.
Links to Download/Update:
