Aaron Brazell has 10 things we need to know about the upcoming WordPress 2.7 release.

Unlike WordPress 2.5, however, this is not merely an update of the backend but a complete rebuilding.

A well-researched posting on the upcoming version. As he says, most of the new features are for the admin area, but they are huge improvements and especially time saving.

Here’s his Top 10:

  1. Vertical Menus | a move that would be earth-shatteringly huge …
  2. Dashboard | Semantically, the dashboard is extraordinary.
  3. QuickEdit and wp-admin Comment Reply | There is a new QuickEdit link under each post title on your “Manage” screen
  4. Configurable Layouts | Taking a page from the new iGoogle and many years of configuration options from My Yahoo! etc, the entire dashboard and the post write screen can be customized to preference.
  5. Threaded Comments and Comment Paging | It only made sense that threaded comments would become part of the core offering and denotes the first major innovation to the comment system in WordPress, well, ever.
  6. Media Page | WordPress continues to push ahead on media management. (OK, since 2.5.)
  7. Complete Plugin Installation and Management | It is now possible to search and browse the WordPress plugin repository from within WordPressadmin. In addition, you can do an entire WordPress upgrade now using this same technique.
  8. Sticky Posts | The ability to designate a post as “sticky” and keep it at the top, regardless of how old it is.
  9. Template Tags | There are a variety of new template tags.
  10. Comments API | The API has now been built to allow offline editors like Windows Live Writer or Marsedit to perform comment moderation and editing from an offline client.