It’s official, the fellows at wordpress made their move and launched the 2.1 version, which seems to be a very interesting and feature loaded release. From the official announcement on the developer blog here is a bulleted list:

• 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.

My opinion is that one of the most used will be the new visual editor. I also understand the privacy options, meaning you might want to keep a blog away from search engine and only for your friends, but there are tons of unpolited robots on the net that doesn’t care abot restrictions. Having pages as drafts is also a gem I usually write static stuff in a more elaborated way and need some draft versions for that. Database tuning and the admin interface much faster will also be some eye-catching improvments.

But the most important thing is to see how plugins will behave on this one, until I will have all of my plugins tested and verified, I will stay with the latest 2.0 series.

Anyway, kudoz to the guys at WordPress for this wonderfull ongoing poem (code is poetry, right?)…