I'll give Brad a pass on being a tad premature with the WordPress 2.7's announcement, because I know that he -- like many of us who use WordPress to power our self-hosted blogs -- was just super-excited about the new release. Well, the wait is over and the official release for WordPress 2.7 is now available from WordPress.org.

WordPress 2.7, named "Coltrane" in honor of the Jazz legend, is a pretty significant step forward in WordPress's history. As Brad noted in his first look at the 2.7 beta, most of these changes are on the backend, but they are designed to greatly enhance your productivity and speed in maintaining your blog. On the front-end side, threaded comment support and support for "sticky" posts make it easier for readers to communicate with one another and access important information.

You can check out the WordPress Codex for 2.7 to see some of the technical details behind the new changes. I had a chance to talk to Mark Jaquith, one of the lead developers for WordPress .org, about the new release and some of his favorite features.

WordPress 2.7 was officially released last night after several months in development. The new version of the popular blogging client features a ton of behind the scenes changes, allowing bloggers to more easily install plugins and customize the look and feel of the blogging interface.

One of the most useful improvements was the decision to move most of the site navigation features to a sidebar where you can expand or collapse the sections you need rather than clicking a link and waiting for the page to reload as you did with earlier version of WordPress. But the problem with the sidebar navigation is that it takes up more screen real estate, giving you less room for writing or managing your blog posts.

Enter Ozh' Admin Drop Down Menu. Long before the WordPress team realized the value of drop down menus, this plugin offered bloggers the ability to convert the site navigation links into drop down menus which cut back on the number of page loads you need to wait through to get from the main page to the plugin page, post page, or other pages.

I had been a bit concerned that the developer would stop updating the plugin now that WordPress includes a collapsible menu. But just a few hours after WordPress 2.7 was released, Ozh" Admin Drop Down Menu 3.0 was released with support for the latest version of WordPress. It removes all the navigation links that show up on the left side of the WordPress 2.7 dashboard and replaces them with drop down menus near the top of your screen. The net effect is that you regain a ton of screen real estate.

We'll have a more in-depth look at WordPress 2.7 later today.

Edit: As Matt was kind enough to point out, WordPress.com will see the roll out of WordPress 2.7 sometime this evening. There is no official word on when WordPress.org will release the self-hosted version, though the first release candidate is available now. -- CEW
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It's a bit behind schedule, but WordPress 2.7 is due out tomorrow evening. Automattic, the company behind the popular blogging platform put out the first release candidate version of WordPress 2.7 just a few days ago, but a beta version has been available for the last few months.

WordPress 2.7 represents a huge shift away from earlier versions of WordPress - at least in the administration area. Most of the changes will be visible to bloggers, but not blog readers. But the changes in the admin area are huge. First, the navigation menus have all been moved to the left side of the screen, giving you more room at the top of the page. The submenus are all also collapsible, which allows you to navigate the administration interface without reloading the page as often.

You can also customize the admin area by dragging, dropping, adding, or deleting widgets like the Right Now screen which gives you an overview of your blog stats or the QuickPress widget which lets you create a post using a stripped down WYSIWYG editor right from the start page.

WordPress 2.7 also lets you search for and install plugins without leaving the admin area. And for the first time, an automatic upgrade tool is included in WordPress so you can upgrade to WordPress 2.7.1 or 2.8 or whatever new versions are on the horizon without having to fire up an FTP client.

The upgrade tool also means that if you just can't wait until tomorrow to try out the new version of WordPress you can install the release candidate today and initiate an automatic upgrade tomorrow. For some reason WordPress still does not provide a simple way to backup your database before upgrading though, so you may want to install a third party plugin to backup your data before upgrading just in case something goes wrong.

Automattic plans to release the next major version of its popular blogging client, WordPress, later this month. But if you're OK with running your web site on beta software, you can download WordPress 2.7 beta 2 today. It's relatively stable, and features a whole slew of improvements over WordPress 2.6.

Some of the most visible changes for your readers will be support for threaded comments and sticky posts. In other words, they'll be able to reply to individual comments without resorting to a silly @ symbol, and you'll be able to make an important post hang out at the top of your page even after you've written more recent articles.

But the really big changes are all in the administration area. WordPress 2.7 has a completely new interface that both saves space (by grouping a number of items together in a collapsable sidebar), and allowing you to customize the interface by dragging and dropping widgets.

But the new interface is just the tip of the iceberg. Here are a few of my favorite new features in WordPress 2.7:

• You can search for and install plugins directly from your blog's administration page. No need to find and download a plugin, upload it to your FTP server and then enable it. You can take care of the whole thing in just a few clicks.
• WordPress 2.7 includes an automatic upgrade script that will download the latest version of WordPress and install it for you.
  

Overall, WordPress 2.7 replaces at least two plugins I had come to rely on, Ozh' Admin Drop Down Menu, and WordPress Automatic Upgrade. I'll be curious to see if the automatic upgrade plugin continues to work with future versions of WordPress though, as it does include a few features that the WordPress auto-upgrade utility lacks, like an integrated database backup tool.