Soon we’ll be seeing WordPress 3.1 and since I’ve installed the beta on my blog network, I thought I’d share some of the new features that I’m a fan of. Keep in mind, this is in a multiple user environment so some of the stuff that I’m talking about here is specific to that. I think most of it should apply to everyone though.

Admin Bar (#14772)

The first thing you’ll notice is the “admin bar”. If you’ve ever used wordpress.com, you’ll probably recognize it from there — although it’s not exactly the same. Since I’ve got multisite running on my network there’s a list of “My Sites”.  It also gives you a link to your profile, along with dropdowns for “Add New”, “Appearance”, and  a “Comments” tab. They take advantage of the new shortlinks api introduced in WordPress 3.0 by giving a short link tab on some posts and pages.

Network Admin (#14435)

In a multisite environment, the Network Admin tab on the left has been removed with a new link in the top right that will take you to a special Network Admin dashboard. This is pretty much all the same stuff that you’d get in the “Super Admin” options panel in previous versions. You can manage the sites, themes, plugins, all the normal stuff you’d expect there.

Custom Post Type Index Pages (#13818)

We’ve had custom taxonomies for a while now and 3.0 gave us custom post types, but in 3.1 we get archives for the custom post types. The work around for this previously was to create a page template with a custom query and use that as your archive page. Now we get a new set of templates to work with archive-post_type.php where post_type is the name of the custom post type.

The Rest

Those are some of the big ones, but here’s the rest of the list from the Beta 1 announcement:

  • Post Formats (#14746) is kind of cool. It takes the idea of “Asides” and makes them officially supported with any crazy hacks. It really becomes cool when you make special post types for photo galleries or videos. This is something that I’d consider adding to my blog to bring t.joshbetz.com right into my main blog. I think of it as the “Tumblr” feature.
  • Theme Search (#14936)
  • Internal Linking (#11420) means you don’t have to go out to your homepage and do a search or go to google everytime you want to cross link to another post. When you click the link button in the post editor, there’s a search built into the dialog.
  • Ajaxified Admin (#14579)
  • Updated Tiny MCE (#12574)
  • Multi-taxonomy Queries (#12891) are huge for developers as WordPress becomes more popular as a full CMS. Custom taxonomies and post types really let us include rich metadata in posts, and being able to query against that is huge.
  • Admin CSS Cleanup (#14770)
  • User Admin (#14696)
  • Password Reset Redux (#5919)