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WordPress 2.7 beta 1 came out today, and I’ve installed it locally on my MAMP setup to get a first look at the new Admin interface. It’s changed quite a bit, and although they WP team is about 2 weeks behind schedule, it’s already looking really, really good. Here’s a quick screencast of how it looks:

WordPress 2.7 beta 1 new admin interface from Jason Prini on Vimeo.

Here’s the Youtube version for the iPhones.

The new WordPress 2.7 admin dashboard

The New WordPress 2.7 Admin Dashboard

The big change is that the menu has moved from the top to the left, some colour added to the “Right Now” section to help speed interface messaging, and the QuickPress area is new as well. It gives you a quick way to post without walking through all the full “new post” page options. The blocks on the dashboard can be dragged around to your preference, and there’s a little tab at the top  that offers control to turn on and off the sections you want.

WordPress 2.7 Admin menu

The new side-menu looks great and has an expanding/contracting slider set up for sub-menus. It works well, and if you hit the little arrow to the right of the menu items, the sub-menus expanded out JQuery style without a new page-load, I think this new set up is definitely an improvement.

It’s great to be able to expand out all the sub-menus to explore what’s where. I think this will help users who are new to WordPress a nice way to get acquainted with the admin side of things.

The new icons will also help visual learners to recall where features are.

Other welcome features

The new plugin area allows you to upload  and install .Zip files of plugins from the admin interface, which will make adding features to your blog a MUCH easier task. Same goes for updating WordPress itself. No more downloading the .zip, FTPing carefully not to overwrite your wp-content, etc, etc. You will now be able to update WP from within the admin itself.

More to Come…

The WordPress team says they’re about two weeks behind schedule, and that the final WP 2.7 will be out around the beginning of December. From what I see so far, it’s going to be worth the wait.