If you’re like us and into building socially competent websites that enable clients to make use of the social web to promote their brand, then you have probably worked with or, at least, thought about working with WordPress. And if you’re even more like us, you spend a lot of time trying to figure out how to make it as simple as possible for the client to keep their website content current. Creating a site that the client has to keep coming back to get updated is just, well, inefficient and frustrating for them.
To that end, WordPress 2.9 has hit the shelves and comes packed with several features that make things easier for the client to manage and therefore easier for us to develop. Here are some brief descriptions on the improvements I like the most with links to more in-depth articles where needed…
Images:
1. Native Post Thumbnails – Everyone loves magazine-style thumbnails on their front page or blog/archive pages. Prior to 2.9, using them involved explaining to the client how to upload a picture through the normal method, click the radio button for the thumbnail version of the image, copy the image location URL, scroll down, select the correct Custom Field from the drop-down list and paste in that URL. Now, WordPress 2.9 comes with an optional feature that you can turn on in your themes to make thumbnail selection much easier to explain and to use.
Using The New Post Thumbnail Feature In WordPress 2.9
2. Image Editing – Making image management just that much easier, there are now crop, rotate, flip, scale and aspect ratio options available all from within the new “Edit Image” screen, which can be reached by clicking “Edit Image” once a picture has been uploaded.
WordPress 2.9 Media Manager and WP Image Editor Preview
Videos:
3. oEmbed Support – Embedding video has never been super difficult in WordPress, but sometimes having to switch between the HTML and Visual tabs adds a layer of confusion for the client to what can be an already confusing process depending on the complexity of their theme. With oEmbed protocol support, WordPress now takes the URL of a video and fetches the necessary embed code and displays the video correctly on the page. All the user has to do is put the URL on its own line. There are ways in which parameters can be added by using the shortcode, but for dead simple video embedding it’s just as easy as pasting in a URL.
Editing:
4. Undo and Trash – These are both fairly self-explanatory. Undo gives users the option to, you know, undo things in the WordPress dashboard, like accidentally deleting a comment or approving a spam comment. Trash is now a kind of purgatory for posts, pages and comments. There is a new tab across the top of the edit screens and these three types of content can be moved to trash and then either restored, if you change your mind, or deleted permanently, if you never want to see that content ever again.
How to use Trash feature in WordPress 2.9 Version
SEO:
5. rel=canonical – The use of Canonical URLs is now native in WordPress 2.9 for singular pages. So, no need for plugins or template tweaking. Whenever you publish a post or page, it will automatically generate the rel=canonical meta tag in the header of the page.
Explanation as to what Canonical URLs actually are:
Google Webmaster Central Blog: Specify Your Canonical
Users:
6. User Contact Fields: – WordPress user registration fields have always been rather limited and an odd collection of information. To get around this, I’ve always used the excellent Register Plus plugin to create additional fields and for extra tweaks with the login/register process. In WordPress 2.9, with a couple of additional lines in functions.php, you can now create/remove user fields as part of the core login process, without a plugin. Makes the whole thing just a little more stable to deal with.
User Contact Fields in WordPress 2.9
Templates:
7. Slug-Based Templates – From a development perspective, this is one of my favorite tweaks as it makes a life a little easier for me and not just for the client. Prior to this, category-specific templates could be created using the ID number of the category (category-<id>.php), which made it a pain to go in and edit these templates. Who remembers the ID number of every category in every WordPress install? So, I would just toss everything into archive.php and use a collection of if/else statements to style category pages. Now, however, with the ability to use slugs (category-<slug>.php), finding and editing templates is much easier. If I want to create a category archive styled a specific way to display videos, all I have to do is create the template category-video.php and I can find it again easily for tweaks, and the WordPress template hierarchy takes it from there.
That’s it for now. There’s are a whole lot more WordPress 2.9 features and enhancements that have been included in this release and as I come across them and decide how useful they are to me, I’ll share them here.
