I’ll tell you all straight away that I am a WordPress fan! I love it. It makes blogging and web content management so simple and easy that there is no need to use any other CMS, as far as I am concerned at least. But now, they have really topped themselves with their latest release.

With WordPress 2.7 they changed the look and feel for the admin section, which is really where the heart and soul of the CMS resides. They have implemented changes that makes things easier to look at, easier to get to, and just plain user friendly all the way around. And they started out with a very user friendly model!

The first change that you’ll notice is the Dashboard. You can see everything in a much friendlier organized fashion in 2.7.

You can see how many posts, comments, pages, spam, and a lot more all when you first log into your account. Then they added a handy dandy feature onto the comments which is right under the “Right Now” section.

As you can see, right from the dashboard you can approve, edit, reply, delete or spamacide the comment! And it shows you all of your most recent comments. I love this feature, because then I don’t have to go to the comment section of admin to figure out if they are spam or legitimate comments. Of course one of the MANY plugins I use is Akismet, so very seldom do I have spam in my “good” comments section.

The other great thing that I love about this new look of WordPress 2.7 is the sidebars! To the left you’ll see that there are lots of menu bars. This side bar is always there, no matter where you go in your admin. Which means you can jump from one place to the next with a push of a button, instead of going to “manage” or “settings” first. Each of those buttons opens up to a sort of drop down menu with all the places and gadgets that you need in that position. So in the middle of installing a new plugin you want to jump to the tool setting, you’re just one click away!

And speaking of Plugins! Now you can go directly to any part of the Plugin section through the sidebar. Once you’re there, the plugins have some other new and fancy changes that have made things a lot easier for the “Pluginaholic”. From the plugin screen you’ll be able to activate, deactivate and delete just like before. But you can now add and install new plugins directly from your admin. You can even search for new plugins by keyword and install them without ever leaving your site.

There are a lot of new and great changes that have been made to WordPress 2.7. I have only mentioned a few of them here. I haven’t come across any problems so far since installing the update. I did have a couple of problems with two sites after installing it, but that was only because we had also recently upgraded to a new web server and there were some details that I hadn’t updated in the config files of those two sites. So those problems didn’t have anything to do with WordPress.

If you’re not familiar with WordPress, I think this version would be the best to start with because it is so user friendly. I’ve used blogger, and was not as pleased with it, but I’m the type of person who likes to be able to get inside the CMS a little more than blogger allows. WordPress is definitely customizable. I haven’t used TypePad so I can’t say how it compares to that. My boyfriend happens to be a Joomla fan, which we are using for our Permit business website (http://www.mercurypermits.net). It’s good for somethings, but I don’t like the admin side of Joomla like I do WordPress. It’s clunky, and it’s not really very good for blogging, although it does have a blog module. We also had to add a RSS module so that when I do blog, it can be seen in a reader. Although there’s no way to add a twitter module to Joomla, like you can to WP.

I hope you’ll go out and try WordPress 2.7 today. It’s well worth it! Don’t forget to backup your blog BEFORE you upgrade, just in case! Better safe than sorry! And then let me know how you like WP 2.7!

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