I’m loving the newest version of WordPress and the newest Artisteer upgrade as well that perfectly meshes with WordPress! The new features that I especially like are the new Menu options as well as the new Featured Image option. Menus are now easier than ever to create, organize, and edit, and an Artisteer generated template works just great with these new options. To do this, all you need to do is simply click on Menus under Appearance on your Dashboard. You can then label and customize your menu easily by adding pages, categories, specific posts, or even external links. Note: you’ll want to make sure to label your menu first and save it as the primary menu. After completing that step, you can add and edit away. This new feature eliminates the need for the Display Pages Plugin (where you could choose to exclude pages from the main menu) as well as the Page Links to Plugin (where you could previously create a page just so that it would be a menu item than link it to a post or external site).

The other cool addition is the Featured Image option. You’ll notice this toward the bottom of the right hand column of your dashboard. This allows you to upload a picture (or choose a picture already in your post) to display as a thumbnail by the title. This is perfect if you are going to be only showing snippets of your post on your blog page. When a person clicks on the post title, the full post will appear with the larger image in the post wherever you positioned it and will no longer display the thumbnail version at the top. There are also some options to set filters. More details can be found at the WordPress support page.

Please leave a comment if you have any questions or other useful information regarding either of these two features.

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