WordPress is one of the most popular CMS solutions online. It’s ease of plugin support as well as custom HTML and CSS deployment have converted users in the past few years to develop professional sites. WordPress has two updates on the books for 2012: 3.4 and 3.5. Both include major changes to the interface. In 3.5 the changes significantly improved speed and functionality within the CMS.

Interface Control

WordPress’ latest version of the CMS includes an integrated interface that is completely streamlined. One of the biggest changes to WordPress is the creation of faster searching and insertion of multiple forms of media with simple Shift/Ctrl+click commands. The dashboard received a major facelift to the CMS TinyMCE Editor with graduated steps for changes to your personal site. TinyMCE has an enhanced distraction-free writing mode. This means that a minimal toolbar is in place so that all focus is on updating individual posts.

Another rapid change for WordPress is an overhaul of the settings page. Under the hood, WordPress focused on minimizing initial settings to bare bones. The result is a more responsive and faster editor and dashboard. Some users may find it initially frustrating to update current settings, but the features are still retained. Within the media page, support for oEmbed, SlideShare, and Instagram are automatically enabled. Some of the more prominent changes for the settings page include:

1. Privacy settings has moved to the reading page for search engine privacy settings
2. Attachment editing resembles post editor pages to allow for proper editing functionality
3. Charset setting is removed for new installations

Theme customization has become more feature-rich. A color picker is available to choose text and background colors more selectively. Galleries are created with drag-and-drop creation for quick upload. This new process should resemble a WorkFlow layout for changes in how images visually appear and can be re-ordered.

Plugins and Custom Features

Under the hood, the latest version of WordPress has enabled several bug fixes to handle faster plugin response and features. Several of the bug fixes are directly related to classes and media settings:

1. https handling for oEmbed plugins
2. Image settings changes to handle multiple images as well as captions in post editor
3. Meta query support for WP)Query, WP_Comment_Query and WP_User_Query
4. Updated script libraries for j Query

This means that many plugins that used j Query script before that may not have worked as efficient will now be able to handle changes due to the upgrade in the libraries. Not only are your favorite plugins still available in the new update, but these plugins can be marked as favorite for easier access.

New installations will face a major change for editing. The link manager is removed. Upon upgrading to the newer version of the CMS, links will continue to work. For newer installations you will need to download the Link Manager plugin. The link manager is also known as a blogroll and show the contents in the SubPanel for your site.

Finally, version 3.4 and the most recent 3.5 both include significant support on theme control:

• Theme Customizer allows custom theme options to be used before activation
• There is mobile theme support for devices. XML-RPC is already enabled by default for ease of use.

This article was contributed by 360 Online Marketing, a Boulder SEO company offering web development and marketing services in Colorado.