I’ve been doing some testing with beta versions of the new WordPress 2.7, which has a very extensive redesign of the Admin console. Yeah, you read that right, the admin console is being redesigned again, even though it was just redone in 2.5 which came out very recently.

The good news is that they’ve really done a wonderful job on the admin console.  As much as I have been saying that WordPress is trully a content management system, they are really delivering on that promise.  A few of the updates to the system I really like:

• Autoupdate moves from a plugin to core functionality – the biggest problem I see is blogs that are way out of date.  Hopefully they will also give those of us that run in controlled environments (ie, the sites I engineer) a way to turn if off as well to avoid accidental updates before our QA process is complete.
• Threaded comments – I’ve been waiting for this for years.  Threaded comments will allow us to respond directly to commenters, instead of having our reply appear serially as just another comment.
• Reply/Edit Comments in Admin – another good one that’s well overdue.
• Ajax Expand/Contract in Admin – there are windows in the manage/write windows that I never use, yet they are always open and always, essentially, in my way.  Now I can easily close them and have them stay closed.
• Drag and drop in Dashboard and Post Screen – finally I get it my admin pages the way I want them, not the way WordPress says I should have them.
• Sticky posts – another “why the heck wasn’t that in there three years ago” feature.  We can now force the system to keep a certain post at the top of the list.  This is great for announcements, etc.