What’s new in WordPress 2.0

It looks like WordPress is going to skip the 1.6 release and jump straight on version 2.0. With the forthcoming release, the question of what’s changed has been asked all over the place. Owen Winkler has written a fairly in-depth posting over on Asymptomatic.net that lists many of the improvements. And, it looks like it’ll be good.

It appears that many of the “big” changes are in the code base and will not affect most casual users; but those that hack, plug-in, and modify WordPress. While the upgrade may not appear that necessary for most bloggers, new plug-ins that take advantage of the new architecture may make the decision to switch easier.

The import routines have been improved making it easier for new WordPress users to convert from their previous blogging platform.

WYSIWYG editor. Not a big deal for me personally, but this should make it easier for a lot of people to style their postings.

Upload images from within a post. This feature may be huge for me. I hate having to go back and forth between two different pages just to upload an image. The Exhibit plug-in helps a little, but hopefully having it integrated in WordPress will make it even easier.

No more user levels. Now a user is granted privledges.

Add a category while editing a page using AJAX.

Pings and Trackbacks are no longer sent when the posting is published, but using ‘a different method’. This should speed up the delay when publishing articles.

And a couple of plug-ins have been bundled – WP-DB-Backup and Akismet for spam protection.