WordPress 3.1 is available and I say, upgrade now!  It's good and looks like a stable release.  I know they fixed problems from 3.0.5 though no one at WP will admit it.

Before you upgrade, remember to backup, database and files, and disable all plugins. 

I promised (on the social networks) that there is good, bad, and ugly in this release. 

The Good – Internal Linking!  Finally – the caveat is it only seems to work with the default WordPress editor.  The good editor plugin authors will surely upgrade their plugins soon.  Here's how it works -

When you write a post/page and want to link to your own content you used to open a new browser, find the page/post you want to link to, open that page and copy the url into the link window in your editor.  No more – when you highlight text and click the link icon here is what you see

It looks different as soon as you open the window but the URL field is the same.  To create an internal link, look for the red arrow in the graphic above (the red arrow will not be in your link window) and click on 'Or link to existing content' – when you do that a whole list of your posts/pages will appear and you can choose what you want in the link!  Cool.  Great timesaver!

Another Good – Post/Page Sorting

You can now sort your posts/pages by nearly any column you want.  Title, Author, Number of Comments, Date.  The sort feature is not apparent at first – but if you hover over any of those column names you will see a little up or down arrow.  Click on the Column you want to sort, wait just a bit if you have a lot of posts/pages and they will be sorted ascending or descending depending on what you want.

The Bad – Custom Post Formats

It's a good idea but the implementation is pretty poor.  There are 10 new custom post formats (yes – posts not pages).  The thing is, the theme author must implement and create those formats!  So – if they are not listed in your theme you can't use them unless YOU define them and YOU style them.  I know I wouldn't go to all that trouble – I'd use Builder theme from IThemes.

Here is what the default WordPress theme has

Yes – two more formats – standard has always been there.  And I tried Aside and Gallery and they are different from Standard in the font ONLY – if you use a decent editor you can do that without all this fuss.

In defense of WordPress, when they first implemented Custom Menus they basically were not usable – you couldn't make them display.  Now they are WONDERFUL!  So surely there will be more to come with Custom Post Formats.

The Ugly – Front Admin Bar

This feature adds an admin bar to the FRONT of your site for whoever is logged in.  That means you!

Here is what it looks like:

It sits at the top of your page – just under your toolbars.  Hmmm.  What it does is push your content down and clashes (usually) with your theme and is very distracting.  If you are trying to get some content to appear just 'above the fold', you can't tell where 'the fold' really is.

There are several ways to fix this.

1.  You can turn the feature off for each user.  If you are the only user, no problem.

2.  But – what if you have an active membership site?  What if you have 100 users (subscribers) or 1000 or 10,000?  There's a plugin for that.  It's called Disable Admin Bar.  Search for those words in add new plugins and you will find it. 

There are more new features but these are the ones that will affect you the most and the ones you will probably hear people talking about the most.

All in all I am happy with this upgrade.  Actually, if an upgrade works, I'm generally happy with it.  This adds some new features that are very nice.

Presented by Cathy Perkins, The WordPress Wizard

If you have upgraded I'd love to hear your experience.  Leave your comment and tell me what you think.