Improved Post and Page management in WordPress

Managing thousands of posts and dozens of drafts will be much easier in the upcoming WordPress 2.3 thanks to some revamped backend code and admin interfaces.

First, the interface changes. In Manage -> Posts you can currently look for posts by search term, or browse by month or category, but only one of these things at a time.

In WordPress 2.3 (or currently on WordPress.com), you’ll be able to filter by search term, post type (draft, private, scheduled for future publishing, or published), author, month published, and category. You’ll also be able to combine any or all of those filters and do them all at once:

so you’ll be able to ask for all published posts written by Lion-O during May of 2007, filed in the “cartoons from the eighties” category, and matching the phrase “Mumm-Ra, the Ever-Living”. That was a hard list of posts to come by until 2.3.

Manage -> Pages will be getting a similar face lift; you’ll be able to filter by search term, author and page type (draft, private, or published).

Better draft management, in particular, has consistently been one of the most frequently requested improvements in WordPress, and these changes are a big piece of that.

Neat huh?

Secondly, the back end changes. The WP_Query class can now select posts by post_status (draft, future, private, publish). This makes it trivial to use query_posts() and wp() for such queries; no more need for kludgey filters and hacks.

WordPress 2.3 comin’, at you soon. Be there!