WordPress 3.1 Provides Exciting New Features For Blog Publishers, Admins And Developers by Dan Bialek
WordPress released the new version of their free, powerful blogging content management system (CMS) today. This new iteration, version 3.1, boasts several features for bloggers and content publishers to help them better manage and display the fruits of their digital labors. This update helps WordPress retain their deserved place on the forefront of the competitive world of blogging CMS platforms.
For publishers who wish to link to previous content in their current posts, WordPress has added the “Internal Linking” feature. This allows bloggers to search for relevant keywords throughout their sites and displays the results inside a pop-up box within their current blog entry. Users can then choose which of these articles they would like to link back to in the body of their new post. This is a great feature for publishers of current events, news and ecommerce blogs. They can quickly and easily link back to related stories and product pages without having to run a Google search in another browser window just to find their site’s related content.
For site admins, WordPress has added a new feature appropriately named “The Admin Bar.” The admin bar is a customizable overlay that appears across the top of a site’s browser pages when admins and authors are logged in to their blog. It allows quick access to a blog’s comments, appearance, SEO features and other utilities via buttons and drop-down menus. The Admin Bar can also be disabled for users who prefer not to take advantage of this new feature.
WordPress 3.1 also adds a new exciting feature called “Post Formats.” This is an innovation that developers and theme creators have requested for quite some time. Post Formats gives blog publishers the option of changing the layout of a post according to predetermined styles built into a theme. Depending on which format the publisher chooses, blog entries can appear as bold italicized quotations, video player windows with customizable dimensions, hyperlinks, chat windows, photo galleries and more.
Post Formats adds a new Tumblr-like flexibility to posts while capitalizing on the WordPress platform’s robust and stable content management and publication system.
The new WordPress 3.1 release is available as a via free download at: http://wordpress.org
Happy blogging.