The WordPress team has made available beta 3 of the upcoming version 2.7 of one of the fastest growing blogging software around.

It has a lot of bug fixes and has been released only for further testing by enthusiasts. I hope you are not crazy enough to install it on your live blog! Please be careful. I advise you to either setup a testing environment at home or if you got a domain or two to spare, why not setup a live test blog on your own web server? That way, you can test the latest version without disturbing your production blog.

Beta is really hot but equally volatile, I must say. It should be carefully handled. And, beta here is not the same as beta as in “Gmail Beta” or shall I say, beta as (re)defined by Google.

WordPress 2.7 is going to feature a brand new look for the Dashboard. Looks great from what has been posted over at the WordPress DevBlog.

I can’t believe that they have overhauled the whole design. This has in fact made many options better accessible. It sure is a departure from the arrangement of the navigation which has traditionally been on the top. Now it is on the left. Of course the design is a lot less cluttered now and looks cool. Can’t wait to get my hands on a beta of 2.7 to check it out before a final release comes out!

Ryan has posted a list of confirmed features for the upcoming WordPress 2.7 :

* New admin UI based on the crazyhorse experimental UI branch with new menus and navigation
* New edit post page that allows dragging and dropping of meta boxes. Boxes can be expanded and collapsed as before and now also completely hidden.
* Ability to hide columns on the content index pages
* Inline editing of posts and pages on the content index pages
* Comments XMLRPC API (Who wants comment moderation on the iPhone? Me.)
* Reply to comments from the admin
* Keyboard hot keys for managing comments
* Threaded Comments and new wp_list_comments() API
* Sticky Posts
* Automatic plugin install and integrated plugin browser
* Automatic upgrade of WordPress
* HTTPOnly auth cookies
* New HTTP request API
* A new SSH2 filesystem abstraction for updates and installs over sftp

After watching what 2.7 has to offer, I think I had a lot of those features on my mind (that needed to be added to WordPress). So, this is something good. The WordPress development team is in touch with users. What the user needs, is what the team provides. So what, even if it’s a little late?

One of the most needed and important update included in 2.7 is the WordPress Auto upgrade feature. This would ensure that we don’t have to shut the blog, upload new update and upgrade database and bring the blog back up and so on…

So, let’s just wait and see what exactly more pops up in the first Beta of WordPress 2.7.