Last week, WordPress released WordPress 3.2 – the fifteenth major release of WordPress.  I saw a slideshow on Mashable of how the WordPress interface has changed over the years since 2003 – and wow, it’s come a long way.

The focus for this release was to make WordPress faster and lighter, but 3.2 also sees a new & improved administrative interface, and the much talked about distraction-free writing mode (which I’m using as I write this!).

Here’s a screenshot of the updated admin interface:

And then a couple of the distraction-free writing mode.  It does feel rather nice, it must be said.  And I think it works too – with a blank white screen surrounding what you’re writing, you really don’t get distracted.  This is a good reminder about website design in general – only have elements on the page which serve a purpose!

Pretty minimalist!   And if you need buttons, here they are…

To use the distraction-free writing mode, just click on the ‘Toggle fullscreen mode’ icon within the write posts screen.  It’s on the top row of icons, second from the right.

A few more important points:

• Support for PHP 4 and older versions of MySQL has been dropped.  This is a good thing – support for these outdated versions was holding back the use of features enabled by new technologies.
• Support for Internet Explorer 6 has been dropped.  This is a good thing too, although I have a niggling concern for organisations (schools are a good example) who are often waaaay behind upgrading browsers.  But it needs to be done, and hopefully this will help convince them that they really do need to update…
• Upgrades are now much faster – as only updated files are replaced, rather than the whole WordPress directory.  Works for me!
• A new default ‘Twenty Eleven’ theme has been introduced, using HTML 5 & apparently responsive design.  It’s sort of similar to Twenty Ten, but different (how’s that for a description?!).   One of the obvious additions is the ability to have multiple rotating header images.

All Hexagon-hosted WordPress websites will be getting an upgrade very shortly – exciting times!

WordPress 3.1 was released last week.  It made me think about how much WordPress has developed since I first started using it.  Although the basics have remained the same, there has been an array of features added in the past year making WordPress (to quote the recent 3.1 announcement), ‘more of a CMS than ever before’.  It’s not perfect, but it’s a brilliant system.

It’s brilliance is in large part down to it’s simplicity.  There are technically better systems out there, I’ve no doubt.  But it’s simple and easy to use – for both users and developers – and in the fast paced environment of the web, that’s a definite bonus.

The simplicity thing got me thinking.  It reminded me of my university lecturers.  They were all, no doubt, intelligent.  They all had a grasp of the complex theories and systems they were lecturing on.  But the lecturers that stood out – those that were brilliant – were those that could make a complicated subject simple.  Not by dumbing it down, but by explaining & illustrating the subject at an appropriate level.

And WordPress does a similar kind of thing, bringing the complexity down to an appropriate level.  It makes the web a whole lot more accessible to people who aren’t technical, but just want to run a successful website.  And it makes it very easy for developers like myself to facilitate this process.  A win-win situation.

Internal Linking in 3.1

Anyhow, that aside (this post is supposed to be about WordPress 3.1)…. possibly the most useful new feature in 3.1 for end users is the enhanced internal linking workflow.

Put very simply, this now means that if you want to link from a post (like this one), to another page in your website, you no longer have to go and find the page URL (address) and paste it into the link box.  Instead, you get a nice list of pages and posts ready for you to select from.  Long overdue, but nonetheless, very handy now it’s here…

Other 3.1 Additions

A couple of other additions in 3.1:

• a new admin bar along the top of your website when you’re logged in – allowing quick access to posts, comments, profile, etc.  Personally, I can’t see myself using it at the moment, so I’ve turned mine off (to turn off the admin bar, go to your Profile page and uncheck the ‘Show Admin Bar’ box(es)).  But everyone works slightly differently, so I’m sure some people will find this useful.
• a cleaner writing interface – by default a lot of the panels in the edit post/edit page screens that were rarely used (‘revisions’ for example) are now hidden.  You can get them back again by using the ‘Screen Options’ tab to the top right of the page.  I like this, it’s a simplification, and it will make the write process even simpler for new users.  When training, I fairly frequently tell users ‘you can ignore that… and that…. and that….’ – hopefully I’ll be saying that a bit less now!

For anyone who is still in doubt about using WordPress as a Content Management System…

WordPress was recently awarded top place for ‘Hall of Fame CMS’ in the 2010 Open Source Awards – to which I say, well deserved!!  This award is open only to those projects who have won the Open Source CMS Award at least once in previous years, and was apparently a close contest between two other top Content Management Systems – Joomla & Drupal.

Having used both Joomla and WordPress, I now work almost exclusively with the latter – and I for one appreciate it’s flexibility, extensibility & just general brilliance!  I know many of my users do too, so thank you WordPress!