Improved Menus, Autosave, Revision Tracking, and Post Locking, FTW!

At WordPress.com, we’ve launched a collection of improvements to smooth your editorial workflow, and save you time writing posts and organizing your content. Here’s what’s new:

• Improved Menus let you organize content more easily.
• Post Locking prevents accidental changes in a multi-author environment.
• Revision tracking lets you see who changed what, and revert as necessary.
• Improved Autosave protects the content you’ve worked so hard to create.

Manage Menus and Menu Locations with ease

Always wanted to have a menu in say, your site’s footer, in addition to your header? Now you can. Currently 15 WordPress.com themes support multiple custom menus including Comet, Nuntius, Academica, Imbalance2, Blaskan, Yoko, Oxygen, Able, Vostok, Mixfolio, Beach, Enterprise, Shaan, Sight, and Simpla.

To get started, go to Appearance >> Menus in your dashboard. There, select from among pages, links, and categories to create your new custom menu. In this example, we’re adding new primary navigation to our header and a new tertiary menu to our footer. Our new footer menu will include a link to our Twitter profile, our WordPress.com photoblog, and our Facebook page.

We’ve set up a custom menu that uses our About and My Travels pages in our primary navigation:

To create our new tertiary menu in the footer, we’ve added links to our Twitter profile, our WordPress.com photoblog, and our Facebook page:

Under Manage Locations, we’ve selected locations for each menu. Our primary navigation will display at the top of the site, and our footer menu of custom links will be set to Tertiary, and will appear in the footer:

Here’s our new primary nav as it appears on our site with the Oxygen Theme, and a bit o’ blogroll, to boot:

Here’s the nifty new tertiary menu in the footer of the site:

Post Locking protects your content

Working in a multi-author environment? Post Locking lets you see at a glance who’s editing a post. You can choose to preview the post, return to the dashboard, or take over the post to edit it.

Let’s look at how Post Locking works. If I go to All Posts in my dashboard — I see that Cheri Lucas is editing my post:

Now, when I hover over the post title and click on Edit, I have three options to choose from: Go back, Preview, and Take over. In this case, I’m on deadline and I need to edit my post. I click on the blue Take over button:

Here’s what Cheri sees on when I click the blue Take over button:

Post Locking offers crystal clear editing status on a post — streamlining and smoothing editorial workflow and helping make it easier for your team to publish new content.

Revision Tracking: see changes easily, revert with one click

With the enhanced Revision Tracking feature, you can see at a glance who has previously edited or contributed to a post:

Clicking on the link next to any avatar shows the changes that person made to the post:

To revert to any given version of a post, select the revision you’d like to keep and then click on the blue, Restore This Revision button.

Autosave: protecting your darlings

Consider this: you’ve been working on that 1000-word post recounting that trip of a lifetime to Spain. You’re headlong into writing. Meanwhile, unbeknownst to you, your internet’s gone down and all your work — all that lovingly recounted detail on The Alhambra’s stunning grounds and architecture — is gone. 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.

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