WordPress 2.8: Very neat, but needs testing

Blog — From the end-user's standpoint, the difference between WP 2.7 and WP 2.8 goes down to a new widgets screen, which allows to see all sidebars in one go.

From the developer's standpoint, however, there are a few cool new features. In particular:

• The new plugin_dir_url() function, which is simply indispensable if you add styles or scripts; with a little luck, they'll make this one work in a WP-MU version, to allow most plugins to work on both platforms
• The new widgets class, which simplifies the creation of multi-widgets
• The new login hashing, which is compatible with the latest BBPress
• Consistent primary key formats in the database schema, to allow for InnoDB tables with foreign key constraints
• Many, many, many other bug fixes and smaller improvements

Let's hope that the widgets screen gets properly debugged before it gets released. I wouldn't expect WP 2.8 before the end of the month. If anything, I'd expect it by mid-may given the major change (the new widgets screen) that was introduced in the past couple days.