WordPress 2.1 Ella Released

The new version of Wordpress named after the singer Ella Fitzgerald was released a day ago and now is available for download.

Under the hood, the following new features and enhancements can be found:

* Autosave makes sure you never lose a post again.

* Our new tabbed editor allows you to switch between WYSIWYG and code editing instantly while writing a post.

* The lossless XML import and export makes it easy for you to move your content between WordPress blogs.

* Our completely redone visual editor also now includes spell checking.

* New search engine privacy option allows you take you to indicate your blog shouldn’t ping or be indexed by search engines like Google.

* You can set any “page” to be the front page of your site, and put the latest posts somewhere else, making it much easier to use WordPress as a content management system.

* Much more efficient database code, faster than previous versions. Domas Mituzas from MySQL went over all our queries with a fine-toothed comb.

* Links in your blogroll now support sub-categories and you can add categories on the fly.

* Redesigned login screen from the Shuttle project.

* More AJAX to make custom fields, moderation, deletions, and more all faster. My favorite is the comments page, which new lets you approve or unapprove things instantly.

* Pages can now be drafts, or private.

* Our admin has been refreshed to load faster and be more visually consistent.

* The dashboard now instantly and brings RSS feeds asynchronously in the background.

* Comment feeds now include all the comments, not just the last 10.

* Better internationalization and support for right-to-left languages.

* The upload manager lets you easily manage all your uploads pictures, video, and audio.

* A new version of the Akismet plugin is bundled.

The development team have decided to shift to a more frequent release with major releases coming several times a year. The next version is coming out on April 23rd.

If you decide to install WordPress 2.1, you might also want to check the post-install checklist by download squad here. While the checklist is for WordPress 2.0.x blogs, many of the tips should also work for WordPress 2.1