I’d been running a beta-release copy of it for a little while.     On the whole, it looks like a nice upgrade for the Wordpress platform.    Specifically of interest is the ability to upgrade your software (including your plugins) “automatically.”    It’s not quite automatic, since you still have to enter in some info, but it does work nicely.   The one drawback is that if you have 5 plugins to upgrade, you have to step through the process individually, and update each one in turn.

Aside from the auto-update feature, most of the changes I’ve seen thusfar have been cosmetic.   The layout is cleaner.    The editor looks like it’s been fixed up a little.  Many things are a lot more customizeable.    It’s hard to point at brand new features, but lots of old features have been polished, with perhaps some added functionality hidden in the fold.

I’ve been really pleased with Wordpress as a blogging platform.   It was very easy to set up (though I’m a technical sort) and very very configurable.   There is a good user base out there, and a lot of people contributing plugins, themes, and features.    In the past, I’ve looked at a few other platforms, notably Movable Type, and didn’t feel the pain was worth return that I got.    Drupal and Plone (which are content management systems, not blogs, but you can do many similar things with them) are also very nice, though often targeted at much larger sites than I’m trying to do here.   Wordpress seems to have the features and flexibilty that I want, and with Wordpress 2.7, it looks as though the amount of time I have to spend administrating the system has dropped a lot.   If you’re looking for a blogging platform, I suspect you don’t need to look any further than Wordpress.