I haven’t had much time today to play around with the “WordPress 2.1 Release Candidate 1”:http://boren.nu/archives/2007/01/17/wordpress-21-release-candidate-1/, but what little I _have_ seen looks pretty darn spiffy. Most, if not all, of the changes in this version are on the backend, back where readers will probably never see them. But WordPress power users are going to love the “changes”:http://codex.wordpress.org/Version_2.1, I think. Part of me is a little perturbed that they didn’t make the spellcheck function compatible with the plain text editor, but by the same token, it really doesn’t matter all that much since Firefox now has a spellcheck function built right in. I think the part of it that bugs me is that the WP developers seem to be giving a lot more of the cool toys to the WYSIWYG people than to those of us who prefer plain text editing.

I also love the fact that WordPress blogs can now be imported and exported to other WordPress locations. I’ve not yet had a need to mirror my blog, but I can definitely see how being able to do so would be useful, especially for those folks who discover that they need to switch providers. The XML file that WordPress creates on an export makes it really easy to move posts, comments, custom fields and categories to another location.

I’ve tested a handful of plugins that hadn’t yet been verified as compatible with 2.1 and updated the “Codex List”:http://codex.wordpress.org/Plugins/Plugin_Compatibility/2.1 appropriately. I’ll have a couple of more I want to test later, but since I haven’t yet updated this blog (for some reason upload times to my server are really long today), they’ll have to wait. I _have_ been able to verify that Counterize II (v2.04), Footnotes (v0.9.1), and Text Control (v2.0b1) all work with WP 2.1. The ones I still need to verify are the LiveJournal Crossposter (v1.5), Random Quotes (v1.3), Sideblog (v3.0), and Xanga Cross Post (v0.1). I suspect they’ll all work fine, but there’s never a guarantee.

All my themes also still seem to be compatible so far, as well.

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