I just upgraded to WordPress 2.1, and I totally dig it. I mostly dig the code name, "Ella" (which is the name my wife and I chose for our daughter), but the biggest mind-blowingly welcome improvements are what they did to the WYSIWYG editor.

WordPress uses Moxiecode's open source TinyMCE javascript text editor. They've beefed it up quite nicely, too. There's a spell checker in there now, as well as tabs to toggle between WYSIWYG and and code view. These new tricks are great, but it's the little things that really make all the difference in the world. Specifically, the use of 1em Georgia for the editor (I set my browsers to the default 16pt size). Writing with a nice, big, serif font is so much more gratifying. And whatever they did to beef up the performance of the editor in FireFox is reason enough for the upgrade alone.

The WYSIWYG editor is still turned off for Safari, even though it has worked just fine with the nightly builds of WebKit for nearly a year. I understand why they did this, but it would be nice to have a preference option somewhere in there to turn it on for us WebKit nightly people. Even if they used a little browser sniffing to hide the option from non-Safari people.

Outside the WYSIWYG editor, auto-saving is a rediculously unexpected feature I never would have thought I couldn't live without. It's way more than anything I would have ever thought to ask for in a web-application. You will love this.

The database has been overhauled to increase performance. They actually had a guy from MySQL do it. And holy crap if it isn't noticably faster in both the Admin area and the front end. I would say by a lot.

I'm looking forward to trying out the new "make any page your index page" feature on future projects. This feature alone makes WordPress a serious contentder in the full on CMS category. It could really be a viable option for some of my budget-minded clients.

Ella is now available in Dreamhost's one-click install/upgrade pane. I used this process for both this blog and the wife's. This is a more complex upgrade, so you'll have to click the upgrade database link in the admin area before any of your post will show up on the front end, but the process is as fast and seamless as usual.