At long last the much talked about fourteenth release of WordPress is now available. The bizarrely named WordPress 3.1 “Reinhardt”; named after the famous jazz guitarist Django Reinhardt, was released on the 23rd of February 2011. It is available for download, or as most regular WordPress users are aware of you can install it through your dashboard.
What are the main new features?
At first glance, most of the changes will be unnoticeable to you after upgrade, but don’t be fooled as there are a few cool new features of “Reinhardt” that separates it from version 3.0. By far the most visible change is the addition of the Admin Bar that you will see at the top of the front end screen when logged into the admin area. Using this bar allows you to connect the back end to the front end of your website. I found this a very useful tool which gives you 1-click access to dashboard from any of the front end pages of your site. For example if I am browsing my website and I notice a small typo or an area of content I would like to change, I can just click on the “edit page” tab of the admin bar and go straight through to the edit page screen of the particular page.
The Admin Bar
The other change that I find really cool is new linking options – now when you click the link icon in the editor toolbar – you get to choose whether you would like to specify the URL link manually or whether you would like it to link to existing pages or posts on your site. Gone are the days where if you wanted to add links to their previous articles, you would have to open a new tab in your browser, find the url, and then add it.
Internal linking
Other minor improvements include a streamlined look and feel to the writing interface, with the ability to hide fields that are not regularly used. This is quite useful when setting up an admin user account for a client and also makes the dashboard feel less cluttered. So far so good for WordPress 3.1 “Reinhardt” and I have now decided to fully install the upgrade using the one-click install. Just remember to back up your database!
To read more about WordPress, why not read our article “10 Top WordPress Plug-ins for 2011“.
