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I’m hanging out in Oakland at the moment, at Techliminal, a coworking space on 14th Street owned and operated by Anca Mosoiu. Contrary popular belief, there are “theres” there, and Techliminal certainly is one of the theres.
Regardless of your opinion of what constitutes here or there, at the time I’m writing these words, I’m sitting in Techliminal’s downstairs meeting area. The occasion is yet another excellent East Bay WordPress Meetup, where Sallie Goetsch (rhymeswithsketch) is discussing the upcoming release of WordPress 3.1.
Woops. There’s the pizza… Back in a bit… Scrumptious. Six humongous pizzas pies from Oakland Pizza Man provided by Ann Zerega Design.
Back to work…
“Hi, my name is…
There are about 35 people here, we’re doing introductions, around the room we go… seems we have about half designers of some sort, another slightly more than quarter are beginner bloggers, and a final slightly less than quarter are interested in starting a blog, or using WordPress for a website.
Introducing WordPress 3.1, featuring…
First, take a look at the WordPress 3.1 Codex page. Clear as mud, right? Investigating all that takes some serious time, especially since so much of it is under the hood.
But what if someone installed an early release of WordPress 3.1 and showed you all the important stuff?
Well, that’s what Sallie did. Now you can check out these notes I took during her presentation, from the comfort of your own living room:
- Sortable post listing: Fresh Ajax, column heads on posts allow search by post attribute. This is super handy for me, I will be able to sort by author.
- Post edit screen customizable via screen options: this one isn’t rocket science, but it’s still useful, especially when managing clients who need as little access as possible to “the controls.” I suspect it’s one of those features which has been lurking in the system as “nice to have” for years.
- Aside post type: This should probably be called a Ma.tt, because that’s how Ma.tt likes to blog. So check it: an Aside has no title and no permalink. How this benefits anybody, I can’t really say right now. Lemme get back with you on that one.
- Gallery post type: This will be super duper for people who post photo galleries. I do not. Next!
- Internal linking support: I’m a big of internal linking, and not just for SEO support. Done well, it helps readers follow the narrative arc of your blog. You do have a narrative arc, right? Tell me you have at least thought about building your blog around a narrative arc…
- Sortable comments: this rocks! I don’t tend to search comments because it’s so difficult. But I could if I would. I like linking to directly to comments, and I’ll do more of it when I can easily find the comment I want to link to.
My notes aren’t complete; I cherry picked what was most interesting to me. You can see slides clicking through the link given below.
Recapping…
- Here’s a link to the entire presentation: WordPress 3.1 Feature tour, presented by Sallie Goetsch.
- Be sure to visit Techliminal when next in Oakland
And questions for you: have you had a chance to check out the new features? If not, what are you looking forward to the most?
I’m actually most looking forward to the Post Edit Screen customization. Since I started building the odd website for other people (completely new to this whole internet thing, but have established businesses), it’d be handy to simplify them a bit.
Heck I’d even do that on my own blog for various other reasons. Saves time.
For most people, this is looking like an incremental release. What I’m looking for is better access to taxonomies and custom post types, and I’m quite convinced this release will have it. But it’s getting closer.
I remember you mentioning those before; would be incredibly useful. Have plans for that already kicking around somewhere.
Thanks for the Face Time at Techliminal. I created my Gravatar yesterday, and will follow up on your other suggestion next week.
Those are some very big boys you know. Gravatar looks awesome! Get that blog together.