New Editorial Features in WordPress 3.6

We’ve been posting about the development of WordPress 3.6 over the past few months, and while the target launch is coming up later this month, many of these features are already available to WordPress.com users. Here’s a quick overview of the new editorial features.

Post Locking

Working in a multi-author environment? Post Locking lets you see at a glance who’s editing a post, and prevents authors from overwriting each other.

See Who Is Editing What Post
If you navigate to All Posts in your dashboard, you will be able to see who is editing what post.

Prevent Editors from Overwriting Each Other
If you click on a post that another editor is working on, you will have three options to choose from: Go back, Preview, and Take over.

Know If Someone Else Is In Your Post
If you are working on a post and someone takes over, this screen will prevent you from continuing to work on the post.

---

Log Out Notification

If for some reason you are logged out of WordPress while still in the dashboard (or editing a post), a pop-up notification will appear and allow you to log in right on the page, so that you won’t lose any work. Once you’ve logged back in, the pop-up will disappear and you will be right back where you left off.

---

Better Autosave

The newly revamped Autosave takes advantage of your web browser’s storage to ensure that you never lose your work again, despite a wonky internet connection. If you are editing a post and suddenly get disconnected from the internet, you won’t lose your work. When you get reconnected, you’ll be able to restore the backup and the browser-stored content will simply pop up into your text editor.

---

Revised Revisions

WordPress 3.6 gives revisions an update, making it easy to scan through previous revisions and see edits or updates.

Avatars with Revisions
See at a quick glance on your “Edit Post” page who has previously edited a post.

See Changes Easily
The new revisions page includes a slider that lets you move forward or backward through revisions, and colors additions in green and deletions in red.

Compare Revisions
The “Compare Revisions” tool allows you to drag the slider to two different revisions and compare the differences.

---

New Look for Post Formats

Note: This feature is still in development. Post Formats got an updated look, which allows you to quickly toggle between different formats (i.e. quote, video, image) using a new bar at the top of “Edit Post.”

To switch to a different post format, simply click the icon at the top.

---

Manage Menus with Ease

If your theme supports Custom Menus, the interface to create anad manage these menus has been updated. Now, “Edit Menus” and “Manage Locations” are split into separate tabs. Step-by-step instructions on how to use Custom Menus can be found here.

 

Want more? To see the many updates that went into 3.6, follow the open-source WordPress development here.

Interested in learning more about WordPress.com VIP Cloud Hosting? Get in touch.

All About SEO on WordPress.com

On the WordPress.com Blog, we recently published a post on Search Engine Optimization for WordPress.com. It has a ton of great information relevant to authors on WordPress.com VIP, so please check it out and feel free to forward it to your colleagues.

All About SEO on WordPress.com, by Elizabeth Urello

Excerpts:

Common Myths about SEO

Myth: I need a plugin for SEO.

Fact: WordPress.com has great SEO right out of the box — you don’t have to do anything extra. In fact, WordPress takes care of 80-90 percent of the mechanics of SEO for you, according to Matt Cutts, head of Google’s webspam team. All of our themes are optimized for search engines, which means they are designed to make it easy for the Googlebot (and other search engines) to crawl through them and discover all the content.

Smart ways to increase your SERP rank

Make sure to use short, easy-to-read post slugs that accurately describe what your posts are about. On WordPress.com, the post slug is the last part of your post title, which you can edit to be anything you like. For example, the slug “/buying-sailboats” is better than “/how-to-buy-a-beautiful-inexpensive-sailboat-on-Craigslist” or “/354.”

Read the full post here.

Q&A: How National Post Liveblogs the News

Since launching our Liveblog add-on here at WordPress.com VIP, we’ve been impressed again and again by how fully the National Post newsroom has embraced the tool as a way to cover live events and breaking news.

They’ve used Liveblog to cover everything, from the Grammy Awards, to Barack Obama’s Inaugural Address, to the Newtown shooting, to Stephen Harper tweeting his entire day. And the results are visually stunning, with a heavy emphasis on story telling through photographs, videos, tweets, commentary, and even gifs.

We chatted with James Martin, Digital Managing Editor, to learn more about how they integrated Liveblog into their newsroom, how they prepare for big live events, and what his favorite Liveblog has been to date.

How does National Post use Liveblog?

I like to use the Liveblog for entertainment and award shows. It’s great for displaying art [videos and tweets] really quickly and efficiently. Rather than us doing picture galleries as we might have done in the past, this gives us the opportunity to do a live picture gallery as things are unfolding. When I talk to my staff about what I want, I tell them to think about including commentary, video, gifs, tweets with the pictures – the Liveblog is an easier way for us to tell a moving story.

How did you train your team on using Liveblog?

To be honest with you, it didn’t take very long to train anybody on it here. It took us about 5 minutes to learn how to use it.

The training process was me getting it implemented on one of our WordPress sites, playing with it for about 5 minutes and testing its functionality. Once I felt like we had a good grasp, I asked one of my staff members to make a 2-3 page guide with screen grabs on how to embed a picture, tweet, YouTube, along with our Liveblog style guide.

National Post’s Liveblogs are rich with pictures, videos, commentary – how does your team plan for Liveblogs?

Too many cooks can spoil a Liveblog unless there is a specific plan. We have very specific roles for people. For example, during the awards shows, one person will be tackling the winners and nominations, making sure the winner graphic goes in. We obviously have those prepared in advance by our graphics editor.

We will also have one or two people (depending on resources) for color. One person will specifically be looking for tweets that value adds on any trends we spot. We’ve also had our style columnist, Nathalie Atkinson, providing fashion commentary at the events.

For the Newtown, CT shootings, there wasn’t any time to prepare. How did your newsroom assemble a Liveblog for that?

For Newtown, we were running stories rapidly throughout the day. Our editors were trying to use their news judgment and a bit of crystal ball gazing – we just didn’t know if this was the type of thing that would work well with a Liveblog. We made the decision to start the Liveblog in probably 15 minutes, after the first reports came through.

At that stage, we were very new to the tool, and there was some learning on the run. But the way it worked best was having one person on the Liveblog, and our other journalists providing news copy to the traditional file. But, there was a lot of overlap. The person on the Liveblog was finding and discovering things, and sharing that information with the news file, and vice versa.

How has your audience responded to the Liveblogs?

The best way of answering that question is to simply look at the type of numbers we get from the Liveblogs. Straight away, the analytics told us that not only are people reading it, but they’re staying on the page a long time and the engagement is high. And, we’re seeing them come back later. That’s the best feedback.

We recently had a big snow event in Toronto. In those situations, people are making split second decisions – can I send my kids to school? Are the busses running? We started that Liveblog at 5 a.m., with quick wraps of what schools are closed, what public services are closed, that’s what people want to read. That information is not always best served in a traditional news file, since shelf life of that information could only be a couple of hours. That weather Liveblog was easily our most read story for the day.

What’s your favorite Liveblog that the National Post has done so far?

In terms of raw news, I was very proud at the way in which we were able to use the Liveblog on the Newtown shooting. In terms of being able to get actual valuable news to the reader, I was not only really amazed at how efficient the tool was at getting information across, but by how our team was able to respond to the event, and funnel what information was needed to be given to the reader quickly.

In terms of showbiz, glitz and gam, any of our showbiz awards blog are great examples of what we do here — we don’t just give people words. The Liveblog really has become an amazing interactive experience with so many dimensions to it. The latest example with The Oscars is probably the best showbiz blog we’ve done.

Not familiar with how the WordPress.com VIP Liveblog Plugin works? Take a look at this video. It’s super easy, featuring content insertion from the front-end of the site, and drag-and-drop image uploads.

The Liveblog Add-On is $500 USD per month, with an annual subscription, for VIP SaaS Hosting clients. This includes unlimited liveblogs, and an unlimited number of users visiting, viewing, and receiving updates — all powered by our massive WordPress.com cloud infrastructure. If you’re interested in using the LiveBlog plugin or learning more, please get in touch.

 

Time.com Chooses WordPress.com VIP for Person of the Year Website

When TIME.com started planning their Person of the Year coverage in 2012, they knew the whole world would be watching the announcement. They chose to publish the site on WordPress.com VIP, and in the first few hours of the site going live, traffic instantly skyrocketed – 3,000 retweets, 7,000 Facebook shares and links from every major media outlet around the world.

TIME.com’s managing editor Cathy Sharick took the time to answer a few questions for us about why they chose WordPress, how they approached creating the website, and how they assembled the site in just two weeks.

How did your team approach creating the Person of the Year website? 
Last October, we rolled out a fully responsive redesign of TIME.com, which offered both a cleaner, fresh aesthetic and a uniform browsing experience across all platforms – desktop, mobile, tablet. We wanted to make sure that the 2012 Person of the Year franchise gave readers that same rich, satisfying experience.

Related: TIME.com Running Verticals on WordPress.com VIP

Why did your team choose WordPress.com VIP to create the Person of the Year website? 
Almost all of our new Web content is now created on WordPress. We have developed a responsive theme that we can use to easily launch a new section of our website and quickly start creating content.

Because we already had this template in place from our redesign, it just made the most sense for us to give users the same experience for our Person of the Year content. There are challenges with any new project, but for the most part creating this new section on WordPress was fairly simple.

How long did it take to put the project together, from start to finish?
It took us about two weeks from when we made the decision to publish Person of the Year on WordPress to launching the new section of our website.

How is this year’s Person of the Year website different from previous years?
In previous years, the way our Person of the Year special was built, users had to click through a single slideshow that reloaded each page to navigate through the content. This time around we created an entirely freestanding Person of the Year section on our site where all of our content could live underneath, whether it was an article, photo gallery, video etc. By clearly labeling our content as “Person of the Year” in this section of the site we made it easier for users to navigate from one piece of content to the next, and from the new Person of the Year issue to previous years.

How did your team use social media to complement the Person of the Year website, and to drive traffic to the site?
Social media has become a part of everything we do on TIME.com and last year’s announcement was no different. The second we published the announcement on our site we sent out a Tweet and Facebook post from our brand pages and spent the day updating our Tumblr and Pinterest accounts with rich multimedia content so that our readers had a wealth of content to choose from on their social media accounts.

Barack Obama is TIME's 2012 Person of the Year | ti.me/VQVajw #POY2012

—
TIME.com (@TIME) December 19, 2012

This year we also partnered with a new startup called RebelMouse because we wanted a place on our site where we could easily display all of the social reactions we were getting to Barack Obama being selected as the 2012 Person of the Year. We published this page where we could feature the responses from readers, and we plan to do similar projects in the future with them.

Want more information about WordPress for large-scale / enterprise installs? Contact WordPress.com VIP Services.

Easier Twitter Embeds with WordPress.com

Did you know that you can embed tweets into your WordPress.com posts by simply pasting in the tweet URL on its own line?

That’s all there is to it. The content of the tweet will magically appear in your post, complete with the avatar, clickable links, and the date.

Photo Blogging 101: Build your photographic following. wp.me/pf2B5-2Ng—
WordPress.com (@wordpressdotcom) May 21, 2012

 

You can do the same thing when embedding YouTube videos, Instagram photos, Hulu clips, and Spotify songs.

No more screenshots or messy embed codes. Easy peasy.