Folks at WordPress have just released WordPress 3.1 (Code name “Reinhardt”), 14th version of World’s most famous and award-winning publishing software. This release has some fantabulous features like Internal Linking and a WordPress.com styled admin bar on front end which makes it very easy to visit most used features of back-end. Read on to have an overview of some major features of this release.

Internal Linking

We can’t stress enough on the importance of Internal linking for SEO of your WordPress blog. To be honest, the process of Internal linking was pretty painful unless you would use some plugins or hacks to find relevant posts for internal linking. With WordPress 3.1 this is a breeze now. WordPress now have built-in functionality to link your new content with already published content. Below is a screenshot of this kick-ass functionality.

I’ve updated my personal blog and I have to say I’m in love with it.

Admin Bar

If you visit WordPress.com as a logged-in user, you will see a bar at top of page which gives you shortcuts to important and most used areas of backend. With WordPress 3.1, you can enjoy the same functionality on self hosted blogs ;)

However if you don’t like this functionality, you can always disable it by going to your user profile.

Admin area Tweaks

Ajaxification: Latest version of WordPress also has improved the posts area too with Ajaxification. You don’t have to reload pages while searching for posts. Also you can go to specific page number by entering page number itself in Posts admin area. Below is a video for this functionality to even describe it better.

Overhauled Blue Theme of Admin area is also included in this release which looks stunning, a pretty good job done by UX team of WordPress.

Now we will cover new functionality from developer’s point of view.

Post Formats

Battle between WordPress and Tumblr is an open secret. Both of them have been trying to grab each other’s user base. Here at 1wd we are die-hard fans of WordPress and I am not reluctant in saying that I’m biased towards WordPress :) With these new Post formats, WordPress provides you out of the box functionality for creating and styling different type of posts i.e links,chat,photo etc.

Here is a pretty good write-up on post formats by core contributor of WordPress, Otto.

An Even Better CMS

WordPress 3.1 allows you to create advanced taxonomies and call custom field queries.Result of which is WordPress is even better and comprehensive CMS. Matt Mullenweg, Founder of WordPress summed up this pretty well in release post of 3.1.

There’s a bucket of candy for developers as well, including our new Post Formats support which makes it easy for themes to create portable tumblelogs with different styling for different types of posts, new CMS capabilities like archive pages for custom content types, a new Network Admin, an overhaul of the import and export system, and the ability to perform advanced taxonomy and custom fields queries.

With the 3.1 release, WordPress is more of a CMS than ever before. The only limit to what you can build is your imagination.

Here is a list of complete features and changelog in WordPress 3.1. All these exciting changes demand that you should upgrade your WordPress right now :D with no time delay. This update is available in your dashboard and you can download it as well from here