WordPress 3.1 – The Scope, Plan, Features and Schedule

It feels like WordPress 3.0  just came out due to all the new features and addons but 3.1 is right around the corner. The current schedule is shooting for December 15th so WordPress 3.1 and the holidays don’t colide.

Features

• Adminbar – As seen on WordPress.com the adminbar at the top is coming to ORG users providing a quick and easy way to access your dashboard, new posts, and is said to be the first step towards front-end editing.
• Internal Linking  – This is the “most wanted” feature in this new release. We all know the importance of SEO and internal linking. This feature will add a new button to the editor and allow users to search for previous posts, by title, date, author etc, and include a link to them.
• Ajaxified Admin Screen – This was part of WordPress Google Summer of Code 2010 project done by “scribu”. The idea of this feature is to enable sorting on most columns and ajaxify sorting, searching, and pagination. It also introduces a new pagination style for edit.php pages in the wp backend. For example instead of paging through multiple page you yould instead just enter the page number and it would load.
• Bug Fixes – As always, there will be numerous bug fixes included in this release of WordPress.
• *Postponed until 3.2*WordPress MU Separated Network Dashboard – If you use MU you know that the backend can be messy, cluttered etc. First for users who have an account (just a user name) will have an option to just show their on-site profiles. Secondly the network dasboard
  is going to be separated away from the site dashboard which will relieve so headaches. 
• Post Templates – With WordPress becoming more of a CMS, this is a much needed feature that will be released in WordPress 3.1. It would allow designers / developers to create custom post templates and styles. The goal of this feature is to allow denoting a post as a certain style/type/kind. Some example styles are aside, gallery, link, quote. This will allow themes to style these posts accordingly. This idea is similar to sticky posts, but taking it to a further level because now you can have numerous uniquely styled posts. Below is the example UI, but again this is not the finalized image. This is just how it can look in WordPress 3.1. [via WP Beginner]
• Theme Admin UI – This upgraded will make the way you browse and administer your WordPress themes much easier.  The current system is a bit clunky, and they hope to do away with it completely and replace it with an updated new and improved version.
• Bug Fixes and Maintenace – As always several bug have and will be stamped out and there will be small fixes to custom post types. This will also be the last verious to support PHP4. WordPRess 3.2 will only support PHP5.2 and above.

WordPress Development Schedule

The planned release is mid-December, preferably no later than December 15, so that the holidays won’t interfere with the release.

• October 15 – Feature freeze; no new features added after this point, so that testing can begin on a stable-ish product (including usabilty testing of new features).
• November 1 – Primary code freeze; any last adjustments based on testing after feature freeze should be finished by now and the focus shifts to fixing bugs to get to a stable beta.
• November 15 – Beta period beings; from this point on, no more enhancements, only bug fixes.
• December 1 – String freeze; translators rejoice.
• December 15 – Release WordPress 3.1 – lets celebrate!
• More info at the WordPress Dev Blog