Ginga WordPress Design Development. Sydney, Australia, Boston, USA

WordPress recently released WordPress 3.1 and we have already begun deploying this update across all 500 WordPress Website Accounts.

WordPress 3.1 “Reinhardt” was named after jazz guitarist Django Reinhardt and the release features a redesigned workflow which when logged in gives you an admin bar strip across your website and a new streamlined writing interface that hides many of the rarely used panels by default to create a simpler blogging experience for newbies.

There’s a lot more in it for us developers as well with the new Post Formats support which makes it easy for themes to create portable tumblelogs with different styling for different types of posts, new CMS capabilities like archive pages for custom content types, a new Network Admin, an overhaul of the import and export system, and the ability to perform advanced taxonomy and custom fields queries.

Following closely my friends at WordPress it looks like the new version of the world’s number one open source CMS will be out sometime in mid December 2010. There are some very cool features that are included.

Internal Linking

This is one of the features I have been waiting for. Adding internal links as you know is very good for SEO. So having the ability to also go through your current site and find links to update is also a cool feature.

Admin Bar

As I use WordPress.com as well, I could see this being included. Allows you admin access to the sites backend whilst viewing the live site – from the live site. A nice little addition. Especially for developers who are completing a website and need to jump in and out regularly.

Ajax Admin Screens

Again a feature I have been waiting for, I do a lot of heavy content websites with hundreds and sometimes thousands of posts and pages. Being able to get deep into a sites quickly and accurately is important and this feature will be welcomed.

Improved UI for Searching/Browsing Installed Themes

Not a big deal for me, but for people who like to continuously upgrade themes (developers nightmare) this is a nice little feature.

Post Templates / Post Styles

An absolute brilliant idea. Being able to separate styling by post type. As an example if the post is a video you can select video template, photos gallery – photo gallery template. Tumblogs do this very effectively and this is a huge leap forward for the guys at wordpress and designers will love it – although it will be more work. Basically, this allows designers to style posts accordingly.

Advanced Taxonomy Queries

This feature creates a much simpler way to run advanced queries. For example, right now there is no way to ask for posts that are in the “Health” category but lack the “Diabetes” tag. This causes users to create complex cat systems to simulate multiple taxonomies. This will make sorting of posts and other post types much easier for developers.