WordPress Update Integrates Widgets, Boosts Performance

WordPress has released an update, bringing the popular blogging software to version 2.2. The update is the first in the WordPress team's goal of a four month development cycle which they announced as part of an update earlier this year.

WordPress 2.2 sees the addition of a number of new features including widget integration, as well as over two hundred bug fixes.

The WordPress widgets make it easy to rearrange and customize your weblog sidebar using a drag-and-drop interface. While the functionality was previously available via a plugin, widgets are now part of the core code and reportedly much improved.

Other new features in WordPress 2.2 include:

• Full Atom support, including updating our Atom feeds to use the 1.0 standard spec and including an implementation of the Atom Publishing API to complement our XML-RPC interface.
• Infinite comment stream, meaning that on your Edit Comments page when you delete or spam a comment using the AJAX links under each comment it will bring in another comment in the background so you always have 20 items on the page. (I know it sounds geeky, but try it!)
• Core plugin and filter speed optimizations should make everything feel a bit more snappy and lighter on your server.
• We've added a hook for WYSIWYG support in a future version of Safari.

The last item, WYSIWYG support for Apple's Safari browser, should be available now if you happen to use the WebKit nightly builds.

If you'd like an in-depth look at everything that changed under the hood in version 2.2, have a look at the bug fixes in the WordPress Trac pages.