What’s New With WordPress 3.1?

by Curtiss   |   last updated January 18, 2011   |   Web News ·

WordPress 3.1 will most likely be released in the next few weeks, and it brings with it a few major changes. If you’re a regular WordPress user, you might not immediately notice many of the updates; but if you are a WordPress Multi Site user, or you are a plugin developer, the changes will most likely seem somewhat revolutionary.

The major change for WordPress Multi Site is the isolation of the Network Administration area. The Super Admin menu is going away, and being replaced with an entirely new admin dashboard for Super Admin users. Developers that initially made their plugins compatible with WordPress MU or WordPress Multi Site will need to make some minor modifications in order to make their plugins compatible with WordPress 3.1.

Instead of using the add_submenu_page() function to add your options page to the ms-options.php page, you’ll need to add your options page to the settings.php page. The key difference, though, is that you’ll need to hook into the network_admin_menu action rather than the admin_menu action. Therefore, the new code to set up an options page would look like:

add_action( 'network_admin_menu', 'pluginname_setup_admin' );
function pluginname_setup_admin() {
  /* Add the new options page to the Super Admin menu */
  add_submenu_page(
    /*$parent_slug = */'settings.php',
    /*$page_title = */'Plugin Settings',
    /*$menu_title = */'Plugin Name',
    /*$capability = */'delete_users',
    /*$menu_slug = */basename(__FILE__),
    /*$function = */'pluginname_display_admin_page'
  );
}

Another major change in WordPress – and most backend users will probably notice this – is the addition of the admin bar. If you’ve used BuddyPress in the past, you’re probably used to the admin bar showing up at the top of the screen. Quite simply, it’s a fixed menu bar that gives you access to some of the actions you use most often with the WordPress admin area.

Other changes have been made to the code within WordPress to optimize certain actions and generally make things happen more quickly and easily in the backend. You can read more about the changes on the WordPress Codex.