Sporkings have been trialling WordPress 2.8 beta recently and we have to say we Love it! One of the best things to come out of this release is the editor for themes and plugins, see screenshot, this is what an editor should look like!

2.8 when officially released offers a plethora of new features:

User Features

• New Theme Installer routines
• Use “Custom Header” for menu text and revise Default theme to reflect change
• Make tags accessible without Javascript on the edit screen
• Allow the dashboard widgets to be arranged in up to four columns as set via the Screen Options tab
• Make titles into links in Dashboard Right Now module (this was in 2.7.1)
• Update Blue Admin Color Scheme
• Show absolute date instead of relative date for scheduled posts
• Autosave post/page when pressing Control/Command+S

Development, Themes, Plugins

• Improved database performance
• Drop post_category column from wp_posts table, and link_category column from wp_links schemas
• Fix delete statements to ensure data integrity when innodb and foreign keys are used
• Enforce consistent ID types to allow for foreign keys to be defined between tables
• Add Sticky to list of post states
• Add a filter to the post states list
• Introduction and widespread use of transient and related fiters
• Add filters so AIM, Yahoo, and Jabber IM labels, in user profile, can be changed
• Add hook “after_db_upgrade”

Advanced Features

• JS script loader Improvements
• New Widgets API
• Menu reordering via plugin

Features That Didn’t Make it into Version 2.8

• Some default shortcodes, maybe the most popular 10 from WordPress.com
• oEmbed support, tied in with shortcodes
• Better UI for post revisions, maybe an optional field to say what changed in a version
• OAuth support
• GeoData for posts, comments, attachments, etc.

The full list can be found here.