Having now worked with WordPress 3.1 for a good while on my personal sites (and just recently rolling it out across all Voxeo’s blogs), I have to say that one of the features I thought would be big definitely is: the Admin bar.

Here are my 2 favorite things:

On a site like the Voxeo blog site, I literally working with 20 blogs. The ability to rapidly switch between those sites using the “My Sites” menu on the admin bar is HUGE. Further, I love that you can switch not just to the admin backend for the sites, but also to just view the site or to quickly create a new post:

My second favorite thing is the “Edit Post” button (which becomes “Edit Page” on a WordPress “Page”). This is wonderful because if you are looking at a post or a page and see something that needs to be fixed, you are just one click away from fixing it. Sure, you could always do this in the past in most themes from a “Edit post” link in the footer… but first you had to scroll down and find it.

These two features alone have made me incredibly happy to have upgraded my sites to WordPress 3.1. The third favorite feature would be the ability to manage comments very easily from the admin bar… which is also very cool.

If you haven’t upgraded WordPress to 3.1 yet, I’d definitely encourage you to consider it. Well worth it, in my opinion.

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The big news in the WordPress world this week was the release of WordPress 3.1 with all the goodness a new WP release brings. The release blog post and the more detailed entry in the WordPress Codex mention a number of features, but two that I definitely like are:

1. The New "Admin Bar" – This shows up on the top of your WordPress window and does indeed give you easy access to common functions. When you have comments, the number of comments shows up to the right of the word "Comments". Seems to be quite nicely done.

2. Internal Linking – Hooray!!! If you are writing frequent blog posts, like I do, and want to easily reference older blog posts, it's always been a bit of a pain to have to find and reference those older posts. Now, when you use the visual editor in WordPress 3.1, you can simply select the text and click the link icon in the editor. The standard window to insert a link pops up, but with a new option "Or link to existing content". You can then simply search through your older posts (or choose from your list of most recent posts). Click the post you want, press "Add Link", and… ta da!

This is truly an awesome capability for those of us who want to frequently reference older posts.

The blog post announcing WordPress 3.1 references a number of other goodies, including improvements to the "Network" support, that I'm definitely looking forward to trying out.

If you use WordPress and have upgraded to 3.1, what do you like the best?

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