• First and foremost – working with images just got a lot cooler!
• Thumbnails Finally after creating several custom plugins for this – there is now a simple way to select and then use a thumbnail for each post. Simply add a few lines of code into your theme’s functions.php file and you are ready to go.

  add_theme_support( 'post-thumbnails' );
  set_post_thumbnail_size( 150, 150, true ); // Normal post thumbnails

  (more details)

• Cropping Ever need to crop a photo for your post or page? You can now upload any image, use built in crop functions to select the part of the image you want, save the cropped photo, and then use it – all within WordPress. Say goodbye to opening up Photoshop, cropping, saving, uploading, etc. Say hello to an easy to use streamlined process.
• We’ve got trash! No more “crap I just deleted that post”. Now you have the option to Edit, View, or Trash a post or several posts. Once the items are in the trash you can easily recover them or permanently delete them.
• Repair those tables please.Now you can automatically optimization your database by adding this line to your wp-config.php file: define(‘WP_ALLOW_REPAIR’, true);

Some screenshots of interest

Use As Thumbnail

Crop, Scale, etc

If you have not updated to this version – please take some time and take a look. The cropping alone will save hours of time if you ever needed to manipulate your images! Overall, this update took things one step further to making a solid, feature rich content management system and I am excited to use some of these new features with each new site I create!

• Eight out of ten sites sites I updated so far to 2.3 had no problems whatsoever.
• The two sites (this one was one of them) that had errors were due to outdated plugins. Once I updated the plugins to the latest versions – everything ran smoothly.
• None of the themes I had created had any problems and some of them are quite complicated.
• Out of all the CMSes I have installed and supported, I think WordPress is by far, the easiest to maintain and the least likely to have major problems after the upgrade. I believe this is because of the talented developers and testers behind WordPress. Great work – it is much appreciated!!

If you have not upgraded yet – be sure and check out my post on upgrading WordPress to 2.3 and enjoy the new version!