WordPress 2.1 & Akismet 2.0 Released

WordPress 2.1 “Ella” has been released by the Wordpress team. If you use what I consider to be the best blogging platform available today then I suggest upgrading immediately. After all, the following new features make the upgrade all the more worthwhile:

Autosave makes sure you never lose a post again.
A new tabbed editor allows you to switch between WYSIWYG and code editing instantly while writing a post.
Lossless XML import and export makes it easy for you to move your content between blogs.
The completely redone visual editor also now includes spell checking.
New search engine privacy option allows you take you to indicate your blog shouldn’t ping or be indexed by search engines like Google.
Any “page” can be set to act as the front page of your site, and put the latest posts somewhere else, making it much easier to use WordPress as a content management system rather than solely as a blogging tool.
The administrative interface has been refreshed to load faster and be more visually consistent.
Comment feeds now include all the comments, not just the last 10.
The upload manager lets you easily manage all your uploads pictures, video, and audio.
A new version of the Akismet plugin is bundled.

In conjunction with the release of Wordpress 2.1, the good folks at Automattic have also released a major upgrade to the best comment spam protection plug-in around. Akismet 2.0 comes packed with an added amount of new functionality that definitely makes upgrading more than worthwhile. Here is what you can expect to see in Akismet 2.0:

Instead of just viewing the last 150 comments, you can now page through everything caught by Akismet.
Major performance upgrades which create less stress and havoc on the database when processing an immense amount of spam.
You can now search the Akismet caught queue.
Longer timeout so it is less likely to let spam through if you have a free key and the load is high. Paid keys are always placed in the priority queue.
The counters now update properly when you clear things out.
A recheck moderation queue page on the WP moderation page to re-submit things in your moderation queue, which facilitates the rechecking of all comments at a later date.
A new counter widget you can put in your sidebar to show a live count of your spam.
You can hardcode your API key in the plugin file to hide the configuration page and enable Akismet as a mu-plugin for WordPress MU.
If Akismet is unable to contact the mothership, it now has much friendlier debug messages.
You can now tell Akismet to discard spam that comes in on entries older than a month. This feature can be found on the Akismet configuration page under Plugins.