Of all the releases I’ve been through and the ones before my time on WordPress, 2.7 (released just days ago) has to be the most ground-breaking.

While there were many changes to the user interface in 2.5 (which caused a hue and cry in some quarters), 2.7 is totally different. Simple as that! It looks nothing like its predecessors.

The folks over at Automattic did a great job of keeping the user community in the loop during its development. They asked us which prototype designs we liked best; published screen shots; wrote user guides and created video tutorials.

A beta version was running on this site long before the official release. (I am a guinea pig). This gave me plenty of time to relearn and to discover the quirks and nuances. When the final 2.7 came out I hit the ground running. However, it did cause me one major problem:

A client’s site had just been rolled out on WordPress 2.6.5. I knew, for a number of reasons*, I would have to upgrade it to 2.7 when it became available. This was fine and the client would never even notice. All part of the service!

But his staff needed to be trained and he was pushing me to get it done. With prior releases this would not have been an issue, however the whole layout, and in some case terminology, altered with 2.7 and I would have had to retrain his people. So I had to ask him to hold off.

A week was lost on the project but it was worth it in the end. For the staff, normally limited to using email, word processors and spreadsheets only, moving to 2.7 from 2.6 would have been effectively learning a whole new system.

*Mainly as maintaining a single version is easier for myself, but also to be able to avail of the latest security patches.