WordCast: WordPress, Blogging, Social Media Guides and News

A week ago, a slightly truncated version of WordPress 3.1 was released across the WordPress.com blog network, and the results were fairly positive and stable. To start off the American holiday season, WordPress 3.1 Beta 1 has been released to brave and daring testers to begin the final stage of the famous “WordPress bug hunt.”

If you are one of the brave and daring and know how to report bugs to the WordPress development team, then downloads away. The list of known bugs are in the WordPress Trac.

If you are like the rest of us, here are some teasers for what is coming in this exciting new version of WordPress.

Post Formats

You thought Custom Post Types were amazing (and confusing), WordPress 3.1 features Post Formats, what most people have really been waiting for in WordPress. Many expected Custom Post Types to allow posts to have “templates”. Instead, the functionality allows users to create entirely new types of content, separate from posts and pages. Mark Jaquith tries to clear up this confusion in his post on the difference between post formats and custom post types.

Post Formats allow you to “Tumblrfy” your blog posts by specific types, making it easier to publish specific content formats. Currently, there are nine post format types:

• Aside: A short post, often with a link, picture, or video, often displayed outside of the post content loop.
• Audio (Podcast): A post formatted specifically for showcasing audio such as a podcast.
• Chat: A post featuring a “chat” typed transcript such as a copy and paste from Twitter, IM, Facebook, or other chat services.
• Gallery: A post featuring a gallery display of images, ideal for photoblogs or those wanting to share a huge set of photos.
• Image: A post featuring a single image, with the first img HTML tag in the post considered the main image, another post format excellent for photobloggers and artists.
• Link: A post featuring little more than a link and the title.
• Quote: A post format specifically to handle a blockquote and citation, a common format for many bloggers eager to point to an article that speaks for itself.
• Status: A post format emulating the Facebook/Twitter status update with a similar 140 character style limit.
• Video: A post featuring a single video.

According to the discussions on Post Formats on the WordPress Trac, the development team worked hard to ensure that post formats would cross WordPress Themes, persisting if the user changes Themes (and supports Post Formats), and adds more navigational and display opportunities for WordPress Theme developers formerly dependent upon categories and tags to designate how and where things would appear within the design.

Post Formats open a wider door to customized content publishing, making WordPress even more powerful as a CMS, but also as a publishing platform. Expect announcements soon from your favorite WordPress Theme developers of updates to Themes to include Post Formats.

Internal Linking

Have you ever wanted to include a link as reference or within the content to a past post? Painful, time consuming experience. No more. Power bloggers rejoice!

Using AJAX and jQuery instant functionality, the link function in the Visual editor now includes a search through your post content to find that internal link and quickly add it to your post.

Using the Visual Editor (not currently available in the HTML editor):

• Type the link text.
• Highlight the word or phrase.
• Click the Links toolbar icon to activate the link options.
• Type in the search terms for the internal link to bring up a list of post titles from within your blog.
• Choose the post.

The result is a well formed HTML anchor tag.

Hopefully, this will be available in the HTML editor for power users who shy away from the Visual editor.

Administration Panel Cleanup and Improvements

A lot of the improvements in WordPress 3.1 are not on the front end. A lot of work has gone into improving the Administration Panels in ways you may not notice. Some CSS cleanup has been underway to remove the UI design bloat and minimizing the design styles.

Improvements added with AJAX and jQuery bring a variety of easier-to-use features to many of the Administration Panels such as sortable columns in the post and Page panels, new pagination improving navigation across multiple paged panels, faster searches for content and pages, and improvements to bulk action filters. The Visual Editor, known as TinyMCE, has been updated to include Post Formats and clean up some layout issues with Internet Explorer.

An Admin Bar was added to WordPress 3.1 that resembles the one used on WordPress.com, offering quick navigation to heavily used areas on the site. The improvements were added to WordPress.com within the past few months for testing and the response has been very positive. The Admin Bar is based upon Viper007Bond’s WordPress Admin Bar Plugin. This is really a benefit for those using the multi-site network version of WordPress as it will make it easier to move between blogs on the network.

Tremendous work has been made on WordPress Theme searches on WordPress.com and the WordPress community is about to reap those benefits with improved WordPress Theme searching and browsing. You can now filter through features instantly to narrow down your choices from within the Theme search in the Administration Panels under Appearance.

Recent changes in how the WordPress taxonomy structure works was limited by one word queries. WordPress 3.1 breaks that barrier and adds multiple word taxonomy queries. This was a tough one as the group worked hard to keep such a query from overwhelming the database and overcoming a lot of the limitations in cross field queries in MySQL. Another issue with taxonomies is the parent/child relationship and making hierarchical taxonomy URLs include parent terms which should make them work more like categories in WordPress. Congrats to them for sticking with these issues!

Another much needed feature improvement is the password reset. Originally, there were two email verification steps, one to notify them of a change to their password, and once clicked and verified, another email to give them a temporary password, requiring them to visit a login page again to complete the login. The process of minimizing all this effort resulted in the ability to reset your WordPress blog password, though there is a ticket up already to improve the login overall in the future.

Separate Dashboards in WordPress

With the merger of WordPressMU and the single version of WordPress, a Super Admin panel area was created in the Administration Panels to manage the various sites. A lot of confusion ensued with people often confused over how to access the different single blog or network features. Suggestions were made to divide these up so that Super Admins could have their own Administration Panel area, called the Network Admin, separate from what is now called the User Admin.

Preview of new WordPress 3.1 Network Admin

The new Network Admin panels and menus should only appear when the user is logged in as the Super Admin. It permits access to network specific management such as Sites, Users, Themes, Plugins, Settings, and Updates, giving the administrator a control center from which to manage the network. The User Admin sees what we all see normally on a per blog basis, based upon permissions.

If you have spent any time inside the inner works of a WordPress blog network, you will find that these changes will make a significant difference in your ability to navigate and manage your network, reducing confusion over where you are in the network system at any time.

WordPress 3.1 Beta 1 Doesn’t Play Nice with BuddyPress

Bugs and patches concerning BuddyPress makes WordPress 3.1 Beta 1 unfriendly testing grounds for those using BuddyPress.

According to the Trac ticket the is_page() conditional tag is causing problems with BuddyPress, as verified by Paul Gibbs, BuddyPress Core Developer, and user Mark McWilliams. They say that the fix should be in place just before the final WordPress 3.1 release, if not sooner.

What Else is in WordPress 3.1?

While the document is not complete, see WordPress Version 3.1 in the WordPress Codex for more details on what’s arriving in this new version.

WordPress Plugin and Theme authors need to go through the notes to be ready for a few changes that will make or break their products, such as adding Post Formats and changes to some functions and template tags. Most are improvements, and few Plugins or Themes should break, but if you are worried, check the WordPress Plugin Directory and WordPress Theme Directory for compatibility issues.

Remember, this is the last version of WordPress to support older PHP versions, bringing all functionality to PHP 5.

Here are a few reports and news bits on WordPress 3.1 from around the WordPress Community:

• WordPress 3.1 Beta Unleashed on WordPress.com – Lorelle on WordPress
• Post Formats – WordPress Codex
• Jane Wells on WordPress 3.1 Development Process and Scope
• WordPress 3.1 Milestones Trac to peak behind the scenes at core development tickets
• Trac Ticket – WordPress 3.1 Intra-site linking added to link to past content easily
• News & Code at Make WordPress UI on work to improve WordPress interface & user experience
• Changes to custom post types meta capability handling
• Mark McWilliams: WordPress 3.1 Introduces Custom Post Type Archives
• Memeburn: Seven new features you can expect from WordPress 3.1
• Mark Jaquith – WordPress 3.1 Post Formats vs. Custom Post Types
• Intro to Post Formats in WordPress 3.1 — FlashingCursor
• Tek Artist: New Linking Management Now in WordPress Trunk with example
• Troy Chaplin: New WordPress 3.1 Features Aim to Create a Better CMS
• Weblog Tools Collection summary Feature Status Update from October
• WordPress 3.1 Project Schedule
• WPBeginner: What, Whys, and How to’s of Post Formats in WordPress 3.1
• WPBeginner: What’s Coming in WordPress 3.1
• WPDevel discussion on Feature Status and Post Formats set list
• WPDevel Discussion on List of Post Format Types
• WPDevel discussion on Post Format UI for Themes changes and features
• WPEngineer’s WordPress 3.1 Admin Bar Announced

Say Thanks to the WordPress Development Community

As an added note to this announcement, if you really want to see what the true inside of the WordPress heart looks like, spend some time reading the WordPress Development Blog and through the discussion and notes on the WordPress Track. The passion and determination, as well as the camaraderie, is clear. This folks love what they do with WordPress and are determined to do it better – all for the benefit of us.

Take a moment in your Thanksgiving tradition to say thank you to everyone in the WordPress Community who’ve given a minute or almost eight years of their life to make WordPress what it is today, a way for you and millions of people around the world to have their say for free.