Hitting the right note?
The fourteenth release of WordPress is now available for keen bloggers and makes slight tweaks to the popular blogging service.
Version 3.1 Reinhardt is named after jazz guitarist Django Reinhardt in keeping with WordPress' trend of naming all its releases after jazz musicians.
The release features a faster and redesigned linking window to make it easier for bloggers to link to existing posts and pages, plus an admin bar so to make a user's most-used dashboard pages more readily available.
WordPress also said in a blog post that its update boasts a ‘streamlined writing interface' that automatically hides seldom-used panels to make the experience less intimidating for beginner bloggers and adds to a less cluttered appearance. Established bloggers can get all the options back by visiting Screen Options.
The company said there is also a ‘bucket of candy' for developers including a new service called Post Formats Support that makes it easy "for themes to create portable tumblelogs with different styling for different types of posts".
New CMS capabilities include archive pages for custom content types, an overhaul of the import and export system in Network Admin plus the ability to perform taxonomy and custom fields queries.
Users of the blogging service can download the update, which is accessible within the dashboard.
WordPress said it hopes to roll out version 3.2 ‘in a shorter development cycle' as '3.1 took too long'.
There were reports that blogging is dying out as younger people choose social networking to express themselves, but the article, which appeared in The New York Times has attracted criticism about overplaying the trend.
Within the article, the chief exec of Automattic, which commercialises WordPress blogging software said that WordPress attracts ‘serious bloggers' instead of novices who can quickly defect to social networks so the company will probably not be worried about the claim that blogs are less popular among youngsters.
Toni Schneider apparently stressed how instead of being enemies social networks and blogs are complementary as networks can be used to promote blogs.
