File Transfer Planet happily runs on WordPress – a free, elegant and very powerful blogging platform. Over the last few years, WP has become increasingly popular and at the same time, more advanced and user friendly.

wordpress admin ui

With the release of 2.7, WordPress had a built in “plugin browser” which allowed on-the-fly plugin installation – where previously you’d have to FTP files to your site. Themes still required FTP however – which I suspect was always a bit of a challenge for novices.

This week, a new version of WordPress came out that improves on the user experience nicely, and more importantly, allows users to install themes without FTP! This is a pretty big deal, and quite a time saver.

installs on-the-fly - evil?

Is it killing FTP? No way. The plugin and theme browsers are limited to the main WordPress repository for these items – yet many, many themes and plugins are hosted elsewhere, in other repositories and developer sites. For these types of situations you still need to download, unzip, and FTP your files back to your site. So to really keep your WordPress blog on the cutting edge – polish those FTP skills. Some of the best plugins and themes are not available via the built in interface!

Did you say you need an FTP Client? We strongly recommend WS_FTP for Windows users, and Fetch for Mac users.. learn and buy them at our online store page.

Interested in learning more about FTP? You certainly came to the right place! Check out our guides, or new forums if you have specific questions. For the record, our forums run on another piece of software by the makers of WordPress, called BBpress. If you have an account on our blog, it works on the forums as well.

Now – back to WP 2.8!! Here’s a video and info put together for the release:

Major New Improvements

First and foremost, 2.8 is way faster to use. We’ve changed the way WordPress does style and scripting.

The core and plugin updaters in previous versions of WordPress have been such a success we decided to bring the same to themes. You can now browse the entire theme directory and install a theme with one click from the comfort of your WordPress dashboard.

If you make edits or tweaks to themes or plugins from your dashboard, you’ll appreciate the new CodePress editor which gives syntax highlighting to the previously-plain editor. Also there is now contextual documentation for the functions in the file you’re editing linked right below the editor.

If you were ever frustrated with widgets before, this release should be your savior. We’ve completely redesigned the widgets interface (which we didn’t have time to in 2.7) to allow you to do things like edit widgets on the fly, have multiple copies of the same widget, drag and drop widgets between sidebars, and save inactive widgets so you don’t lose all their settings. Developers now have access to a much cleaner and robust API for creating widgets as well.

Finally you should explore the new Screen Options on every page. It’s the tab in the top right. Now, for example, if you have a wide monitor you could set up your dashboard to have four columns of widgets instead of the two it has by default. On other pages you can change how many items show per page.

And Even More

You can read the full list of over 180 new features, changes, upgrades, and improvements on the Codex. The list is exhausting!

via WordPress › Blog » 2.8 Release Jazzes Themes and Widgets.

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