Matthew Mullenweg announced at Wordpress.org that WordPress 2.1 "Ella" is available for download. Some of the new features and changes listed in this version of WordPress that I think users will like include:
- Autosave makes sure you never lose a post again. I'm a habitual browser closer before saving my work...so this will be a big one for for me!
- A tabbed editor that 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.
- 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.
- Pages can now be drafts, or private.
- Comment feeds now include all the comments, not just the last 10.
- A new version of the Akismet plugin is bundled.
Developers are also expected to like the cleaner code, API improvements, and a number of other improvements since WordPress 2.0 was released. Most of these improvements should especially help in WordPress plugin development.
References: Original Announcement