Yesterday, WordPress 3.1 was released. There was an accompanying blog post that attempted to describe the new features.
The feature I immediately noticed was the new admin bar. It mimics the admin bar found over at actual wordpress.com blogs. It looks pretty nice.
It was clever that it included a little stats graph in there as a bonus. I’m not sure if I understand the motivation to have Widgets as an item, but Themes make sense. The box that pops up when you click shortlink could look a little better but it’s great that’s it’s auto-highlighting. The Add New > Post is a great shortcut in any case. Oh, how long I’ve waited for that built in admin bar?
The other features noted in the blog post were redesigned linking workflow and streamlined writing interface. Okay, where were those? I disabled my visual editor so I cannot attest to any new feature – at the very least it isn’t sitting in the HTML editor. To see it, the visual editor must be turned on – no luck for use HTML-only people.
As for that streamlined writing interface? I’m not sure. The old bug I saw many years ago has been fixed in someway. Inside of covering the editing area the right floating panels now drop off the page for small windows. It might have been introduced in a previous version, but it’s always annoyed me that I couldn’t edit with a small window.
The other mention was that worthless panels would be hidden or closed by default. I noticed that with a clean user account, but with my normal account, it’s not quite obvious. Now by default, many panels under screen options are unchecked and are thus hidden. That’s pretty cool!
Irony
After writing this post and thinking back to my old WordPress posts, I get the feeling I have been blogging for a long time. The first post about WordPress specifically was written on July 29, 2008. Two years and six months later, here I am sitting in a college class room completely ignoring the instructor and his foolish table lesson plan, blogging about WordPress features.