First Look: What’s New in WordPress 3.1?

WordPress 3.1 is getting closer; the new version is now in Release Candidate 4. While there were some fairly significant changes during the RC staging of this release, we feel that what is in the present RC is likely representative of the final production release. That means it’s time for us to take a first peek under the hood and find out what’s new in WordPress 3.1.

Though 3.1 is only a minor version release, there are several noteworthy enhancements. In addition to a number of bug fixes, the highlights that most people will see all relate to the admin system — yes, believe it or not, they have found ways to make the WordPress admin system even easier to use (bravo!):

The Admin Bar

The Admin Bar in use by an Administrator.

The Admin Bar functionality is clearly inspired by the top menu you see used on WordPress.com. The toolbar looks visually similar and serves some of the same purpose. You can see the Bar in action in the screenshot at left. The options on the Bar give you fast access to key functions — adding new content, administering comments and dealing with widgets. Note that the bar also includes alerts for updates — a nice move on the usability side of things.

The Admin Bar is, by default, only shown on the front end of the site. While this is a nice feature, as it will certainly save site administrators clicks, you will probably also want to enable it for use inside the admin interface. If you want it to appear in the admin system, you must open the User Profile Editing page and check the option Show Admin Bar in dashboard.

The Admin Bar is available to all user roles. The options offered by the Bar vary according to the privileges granted to the user role. Users assigned to the Basic Subscriber role can only use the Admin Bar to access their profile for editing, or to log out of the system. Administrators have the widest range of options and tools at their disposal.

Improved Access to Search

As you can see in the screenshot above, the Admin Bar also includes a search box. That’s the good news. The bad news is: It is just the standard front end search. It will not, sadly, pick up posts that are not published. Type a query into the box and you are taken to the front end of the site and shown a standard search results page. Draft items, or items marked Pending Review do not appear in the search results. So, while it is an improvement over previous versions of the system (which had no access at all to search from within the admin system), it is rather….limited. A bit of a disappointment for those with larger sites and those who simply hoped we were going to get a true admin system search functionality (please!).

Internal Link Manager

The Insert/edit link pop-up has several changes.

WordPress 3.1 addresses one of the most common feature requests from site administrators, that is the ability to easily link to internal pages on a site. The solution comes through an enhancement to the Insert/edit link functionality that is attached to the WYSIWYG editor in the core. Highlight a bit of text and click the link icon on the editor toolbar and up pops the screen you see at right. Note that it differs from the Insert/edit link function in WordPress 3.0.x in several regards: First, there is now a new option, labeled Or link to existing content. If you click the arrow next to that option, the pane folds open to reveal a search box and a listing of recent content items. You can either select from the list or start typing a search query and the system will filter the list for you. Once you find what you want, just click the name and the system will add it as the URL and use the item’s title for the link Title field.

You will also notice that the Insert/edit link pop-up is missing something: The class field is gone. Why this has been removed is a bit of mystery. Though it was certainly redundant, it was also a useful option in situations where you wanted to use distinctive styling in one area of a site, or in one content type. Still, I doubt many people used it and there are other ways around this, so it’s not much of a loss. One other change: The target attribute has been simplified to a checkbox to enable the URL to open in a new window (_blank).

Post Formats

Use the radio buttons to select a Post Format.

The WordPress 3.0.x series supported the creation of templates for the Pages on the site. The template is selected from Page Attributes section of the editing window. In the past, there was no parallel functionality for the Posts content type — despite the clear importance of Posts to the system. In WordPress 3.1, Posts can now be assigned to their own templates or “Post formats,” as they are officially called. The implementation, oddly, is different from that in the Pages editing screen. Where Pages uses a combo box, Posts relies on a series of radio buttons (called the “Post metabox” in WordPress lingo), as seen in the screenshot at left.

As you can also see in the screenshot, the default Twenty Ten theme has been modified for this release in order to include Post formats. The two Post formats shown, “asides” and “gallery,” are only two of the many formats that are available to themes that provide support for this feature.

As a developer, you will want to take a look at this page in the WordPress Codex to learn more: http://codex.wordpress.org/Post_Formats

Additional Changes

There are a number of other changes, many of which are a bit more esoteric.

• The new Multisite (aka Network Admin) option, will be of interest to you if you are running multiple WordPress sites and need to have access to them all.
• Enhanced support for Custom Post type creation; you can now easily create an Archive post type with its own listing.
• Support for advanced queries that will allow developers to query multiple taxonomies or custom fields.

There are a number of changes that will affect developers and plug-in maintainers. If that sort of thing is of interest to you, then you should visit http://codex.wordpress.org/Version_3.1 for a full listing of the changes.

The Verdict

Our conclusion: WordPress 3.1 adds several features that will be of interest to site owners, and to developers. For site users, there will be few visible differences. The enhancements to the admin interface are most welcome and for theme developers, the addition of Post Formats brings new flexibility to theme design. The only disappoint here — and it is slight — is in the admin search. While it’s nice that you can now easily reach the site search from the admin system (or from a theme that does not implement search), it really would have been more useful if it was more comprehensive in scope.

We should also add a note that this release was originally slated to include a number of AJAX enhancements to the admin system, but they were dropped during the RC phase of the testing. It was a shame to see them go, but I am sure they will find their way into the next release.

We are looking forward to the release of WordPress 3.1 and we will certainly be upgrading our sites. The admin features alone make it an attractive improvement to the system.

>> Grab your own copy of WordPress 3.1 here.