I can’t recall, when I was so excited about new WordPress release, like I am for 3.1 branch. It basically changes everything for us, with two simple features: custom post type archives and post formats. With these two new features, our new layout engine will become as flexible as a separate CMS. For instance, you won’t need to create portfolio galleries, blog index, FAQs etc. inside pages anymore – all will become available by default. You also won’t need to mark specific posts as featured with categories, instead you’ll have post formats for this purpose.
Custom Post Type Archives
This feature really kicks ass and I’m not sure why this wasn’t implemented before. When you create portfolio as custom post type, you probably want to have index of them as well. So far, you needed to create new templates and hooks to achieve that, but from 3.1 on, you’ll have full control over your post archives and will be able to define your permalink structure correctly: portfolio/portfolio_item and portfolio/ will include index of all items.
Post Formats
This feature is very powerful and allows you to denote a post as a certain format. Some example formats are aside, gallery, link, quote. This will allow themes to style these posts according to format. I also see a great potential for theme developers as we’ll be able to create dummy posts for instance, which will be easy to manage from users point of view – now, if you import dummy posts for your theme, the only way to delete them or even apart them from your regular content is to review each one separately.
All new features for 3.1 release:
- Post Formats (#14746)
- Theme Search (#14936)
- Internal Linking (#11420)
- Admin Bar (#14772)
- Ajaxified Admin (#14579)
- Updated Tiny MCE (#12574)
- Multi-taxonomy Queries (#12891)
- Custom Post Type Index Pages (#13818)
- Admin CSS Cleanup (#14770)
- User Admin (#14696)
- Network Admin (#14435)
- Password Reset Redux (#5919)
For more information, visit WordPress 3.1 relase page.
michael stephenson says
Thanks for giving us an in-depth, to-the-point overview of the new update. It is so refreshing to know this info comes from a very credible source.
-m
Julian Sutter says
It is good to see wordpress continuing to move in the direction of a CMS. Personally I am excited about the better handling of MU, as blog hosting via MU allows for some great site projects.
Henno Kruger says
Okay, one question. For some reason my category pages don’t show correctly after I’ve upgraded to 3.1? http://rwant.co.za – Visit any category link to see what I mean