So first of all I’ll say that the most obvious change is the dashboard. It looks great. I was actually a fan of the old way they had it and was a little skeptical when I saw some of the early designs, but this is great. It gives much more space for writing. All the menus are in the left sidebar. All the sub menus are collapsible. The whole sidebar also collapses in a kind of Photoshop sidebar way, leaving small icons on the side and giving even more screen real estate for writing.

The add new post screen is looking good too. It’s a little lighter and simpler than it was in the past. The title and content areas are a little bigger and the right sidebar is right up on the edge of the window. The publish section is right up on top by default followed by the tags and then the categories. If you don’t like them like this though you can move them again. Glad to see that feature back. There’s also a “stick to front page” option that I think was in previous version, but it must have been hidden. I tryed that out and it is very cool. The excerpt box is now right under the post box. I am a huge fan of this, since I use excerpts fairly regularly because of my homepage layout. I have a plugin that does it automatically, but for gallery pages it just gets a big chunk of code and messes up the homepage, so I end up having to set it myself. The sections on the bottom can also be moved around though, if you use let’s say the comments options more than the excepert options.

The last really big change that I see is the comments page. It’s layed out very nicely and really takes advantage of a large monitor. It just really makes everything really easy to read.

Overall this is a great realease and I’m excited for the final release. The next version of the iPhone app is also coming out and has some new features that will work with WordPress 2.7