As you might have heard through the Bonsai or through the blogosphere in general, Wordpress v1.5 has been released! This is a great day for many Wordpress users as Matt and team have added a slew of noteworthy features to this newest build, including but not limited to:

  • Theme Manager - a robust and quite powerful editor for Wordpress themes. The advantage of using this is that you can easily package themes for GPL release.
  • Brand-spanking new Dashboard - I like to call this the Wordpress hub. It includes built-in feeds for the Wordpress Development Blog and Planet Wordpress in addition to the latest activity for your blog (recent posts, comments, blog stats and incoming links).
  • Restructured GUI - the whole backend has received a minor facelift but more importantly it’s been reorganized for ease of use.
  • And other things including cleaner code (wasn’t it pretty clean already?), tweaks, etc. If you’re interested, Weblog Tools Collection covers the new features in more depth.

I’ve upgraded kartooner.com to use v1.5 which means you can expect a full design overhaul soon. If you’re running Wordpress (or not) and haven’t upgraded already, what are you waiting for?

Update: Not only did I upgrade the nightly version of Wordpress to v1.5 (Strayhorn), I also implemented Colin’s splendid Sidebar Tabs plugin in order to make use of efficient space. Grab it while it’s hot!