Wordpress Announces Easier Internal Linking and Other New Features

Wordpress have announced some great new features, which will shortly be available in Wordpress 3.1 for self hosted Wordpress blogs, and soon after for Wordpress.org which is the free Wordpress blogging site.

The new features include Easier Internal Linking, Column Sorting, Better Pagination, and IE9 Support.

Easier Internal Linking

This for many people will be a great bonus I am sure.

Most of us have faced the situation when writing a blog post, where we want to add a link to a previous post on the same blog, but don't know the url for that post.

We either have to open another tab in the browser, open the blog, search for the post, and copy the url, or save the current post and exit, find the post we want, copy the link, then go back in to the new article and continue editing.

This is a real chore, especially if you have to do it multiple times.

Well in future when adding a link to another post in a blog, an extra field will pop up when adding a link, giving you the option of typing (or pasting) the link, as now, or entering a search word/phrase, which will cause all matching posts and pages to be listed.

Just click on the one that you want, and the link will be selected for you.

I know that I will find this very useful.

Column Sorting

In the past when you needed to find a post, page or media item in your Wordpress blog, you had to page through the content one page at a time to get to it, which on a blog with a lot of content was really tedious.

Column sorting has now been introduced, so that you can sort your Posts (for example) by Date, Title, Author etc.

Certainly as blogs get bigger over time, this is going to make life a lot easier.

Better Pagination

Although column sorting will make life easier when trying to find a post, page or media item on a blog, if there are a lot of items you might still have to trudge through a number of pages.

Now though, it will be possible to go direct to a specific page, for example if you are on page 3 of 20 and you think that the item you want might be on page 12, instead of having to go page by page all the way to page 12, you can now select it and go there directly.

This will again be a big time saver and certainly of more benefit the larger a blog becomes.

Improved IE9 Support

Some people who have been using IE9 (the default browser on Windows 7) have been apparently having problems with the drag and drop features in Wordpress, or with the visual editor when creating posts.

Apparently these problems have now been fixed, which is a bonus for those who are using Windows 7, unlike some of us who are still content to be using XP and Firefox.

Other Wordpress Enhancements

Several other enhancements were also announced, including:

Revised Blue Color Scheme - you can now choose between a gray and blue dashboard

Ajax Search Results - the use of Ajax will make search results appear faster and will no longer require the screen to be refreshed for the results to appear.

Well I for one am looking forward to these new enhancements, and it's good to see Wordpress continue to develop in the right direction.

If you haven't created your own Wordpress blog yet, and are wondering what the advantages might be, you might find these articles useful:

Promoting Your Articles Using a Free Wordpress Blog

When is Creating a Blog on Wordpress.Com A Good Idea

Sources:

Wordpress.com