With the impend­ing release of Word­Press 2.7, I thought I’d share some of the new fea­tures and styl­ing from the betas.

First thing’s first, the admin pages have seen a big redesign which nicely brings Word­Press up to date with trendy drag-and-drop func­tion­al­ity. The new design has a very clean and simple look yet it packs in lots of inform­a­tion, styl­ishly. It’s not as col­our­ful as 2.6 which wor­ries me in a way as the col­ours they have used look gar­ish and out of place.

What strikes me most is how integ­rated Word­Press now feels. Once you’ve installed it, you may never need to use FTP again. Plug-in installs and updates can be done within the admin inter­face — very easily.

Of course, as with many big ver­sion over­hauls, most plug-ins don’t work and there are quite a few things that I don’t think have been wisely placed. For example, whilst the new nav­ig­a­tion strip is a wel­come change to the old nav­ig­a­tion bar, it is too long and there are quite a few things that I’ll never use. Of course, you can “min­im­ise” it if you wish.

There’s been a big push towards mak­ing the inter­face more cus­tom­is­able and so you are able to remove panes that you don’t like and you can even trans­form it into a single column dis­play just by drag­ging the panes into one single column. So in a sense, it feels a lot more like a desktop application.

Quick­Press allows you to quickly bash out a post — Twit­ter–style — and whilst I prob­ably won’t be using it, I can see many who will. Although, with the lack of cat­egory selec­tion, its poten­tial is ser­i­ously limited.

Added to all these new fea­tures, 2.7 also sees a huge num­ber of secur­ity fixes and gen­eral bug fixes — essen­tially mak­ing this a must-upgrade situation.

Among all the seem­ingly Web 2.0 traits, 2.7 trans­forms Word­Press into more than just a simple blog­ging plat­form. And I dare say that this new ver­sion will be one of the major evol­u­tions of Word­Press so far.