WordPressMU 2.8.1 now out, features and a couple bugs

Late on Friday, if you missed it over the weekend, Donncha announced that WordPressMU 2.8.1 has now been officially released. He skipped right over 2.8, in case you’re wondering where that went.

Right now, if you upgrade the biggest bug seems to be the upgrade nags persists. As in, it doesn’t go away. Not for the regular upgrade, nor for plugins that need upgrading. Multiple trac tickets have been filed. If you want to disable that update nag, there’s a plugin for that.

UPDATE: this has been fixed, see ticket 1037

Also, if you run a BuddyPress site, Andy has asked that you hold off until he releases BuddyPress 1.0.3 before upgrading WPMU.

So, what’s new in 2.8.1? Well, if you noticed back in 2.7, the admin area seemed to lag. That was a problem initially with single WordPress that trickled on through. It seems to have cleared up a bit.

There’s a new widget class as well. Old widgets should still work, but you no longer have to specify them for multiple use. They all are now. Check out the complete guide to creating a widget from Justin Tadlock.

Speaking of widgets – there’s a completely new interface for widget management. We’re back to dragging and dropping.

The theme editor and plugin editor are still disabled, but differently. Instead of a die in each file, they are disabled in the /wp-admin/includes/mu.php file.

You can now add users when importing another blog. Before, this failed.
You also now have the option to disable a notification email if the site admin is manually adding users in the backend.
There’s a link under the Dashboard menu item that lists all your blogs “My Blogs” on a separate page. This had been added to the profile page, and is now moved.
More support for IIS rewrite rules is included.
The theme installer now works and searches the official theme repository. This is only available to site admins.
There were a few security issues fixed as well.

And as a minor enhancement, Ron & I submitted a change to the install screen which highlights the radio buttons to choose between a subdomain or subfolder install. Too many people just didn’t seem to “see” it on the page.

There’s a full log of changes here if you want to see all the tickets and what was rolled in when, and you can also see a through list of what when in to Wordpress 2.8 and 2.8.1.

The merge is 99% of the way done, so there’s really only the tricky parts left. Most of the single-user information is now the same in WordPressMU.

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