I’ve finally settled in some and I am getting around to finally updating to the latest versions of Wordpress and K2. So far the job is going great and I am starting to get a little bit of a handle on what I will do doing and how everything works, more on that later.
Wordpress 2.1
Matt had anounced that this version will be entitled Ella after jazz vocalist Ella Fitzgerald. Major updates include:
* 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.
Personally, I think this is the fastest version to date and the update process was as painless as ever. Additionally, the Wordpress team has included some new toys fro developers including cleaner codebase that previous versions. Some of the improvments include:
* Psuedo-cron functionality let’s you schedule events much like cron.
* Users admin can now comfortably handle hundreds of thousands of users.
* The new WP_Error class cleans up how we do error reporting and handling.
* The javascript loader makes it easier for plugins to include rich functionality.
* Tons of new hooks and APIs.
* We’ve started to fill out our code inline documentation.
* Image and thumbnail API allows for richer media plugins.
* Custom header, color picker, and image cropping framework.
* Over 550 bug fixes.
K2 v0.95 Release Candidate
Michael has announced the release of version 0.95 of K2. This version is compatible with Wordpress 2.1 and will ve the last version to support anything before version 2.1 so update Wordpress and K2 as soon as you can if you use them! After updating I found my whole blog to be faster loading and as usual no problems with updating.
When I get some more time I will speak about what’s happening here in my new home of St. Lois. take care everyone. 
