WordPress 3.3 Update & App 2.0 Update
on Dec 21 in Blog, News, Review by Phoenix_ws
The developers have been very busy at WordPress the last few months getting the newupdated versions of WordPress 3 and of the smart phone app also. I have recently upgraded both and thought i tell you my thoughts of the improvements and the downsides of the new upgrades if any.
WordPress 2.0 Iphone/ Android App
The orignal app that WordPress released was quited limited although it functioned quite well on a mobile it was not optismised for a tablet at all. The whole interface was scretched and sometime response to the touch screen caused the app to crash and there was no enlargement of buttons or clickable areas.
WordPress released 2.0 version and at last they have made a step closer to almost being perfect for usage by the often blogger. The interface is very friendly now for both phones and tablets the quick navigation allows you to jump from pages to posts easly adding content to a post or making a new one is very simple indeed. You can even geo tag locations as well as add new media straight from the tablet or phone, the layout once in the all pages or post section is a clickable list on the left with the newest post or page open on the right. The only let down i can see is i use the custom fields to add images like thumbnails and other features onto the posts and pages.
Overall the look is a lot better epecially on the tablet and for the basic user it is perfect or to make adjustments to current posts and pages.
WordPress 3.3 Update
The new release of the latest wordpress software hosts a new admin which has also been ehanced for the mobile user making all the features available to touch screen devices where as before a lot of functionaility was not available. The menu’s have been combined and now are accessible by tablets and touch screen devices as well as an improved media uploader which has a file type regonistion feature built in so only one media button for all types of files, PDF, video and images.
For the developers out there the biggest noteable changes are the following :
- -Use the postname permalink structure without a performance penalty
- -Improved Editor API
- -is_main_query() function and WP_Query method
- -Remove a number of funky characters from post slugs
- -jQuery 1.7.1 and jQuery UI 1.8.16
- -A new Screen API for adding help documentation and adapting to screen contexts
- -Improved metadata API
The full list for all the improvements are noted on the official WordPress Codex
When i first saw the updates i was a bit sceptical due to the compression of the menus, but on using it awhile seems a lot neater and because it works with tablets also makes it even better. Also the menu across the top of the page now allows you to have links to add new pages, post and more which somes took quite a few mouse clicks to achieve. I think for me is the new feature of being able to customise the post editor and the TinyMCE buttons and even add additional editors, which could come in handy for layout purposes depending on the impact of speed of the site.
Overall
WordPress are finally thinking into the future of mobile technology being a big part of traffic and usage of WordPress blogs and website. These updates are great and i look forward to using them all and experimenting with the new development features that have been added to the API.
