WordPress News: Jetpack Gets A New Look And Some Added Features

Since its initial release, the Automattic team has continually been working to make the Jetpack plugin an amazing plugin.

For example, the original release of the Jetpack plugin contained a bug in the code that somehow managed to breakdown some security barriers. As soon as this issue was identified the release the Jetpack 2.9.3 update that immediately addressed the issue. Since then they’ve been making great efforts towards creating

The most recent update that they’ve made to plugins however, has less to do with the technical side of things and more based on appearance over anything else.

Jetpack Has A Shiny New Logo

The first logo design for Jetpack resembled a look that you would expect with the name: a jetpack. However, the logo lacked that little something that would have made it a brandable product.

The team at Automattic seemed to catch on to this, and with the Jetpack 3.1 update, they did a logo overhaul. As you can see from the picture above, the new logo is clean, flat, and simple – and nothing about it resembles the old jetpack logo that we’re all used to, however, I don’t consider that a bad thing.

The feel of the logo has a more unique and brandable look to it. Is that important? Absolutely! Jetpack looks like it will continue to be pushed as a part of WordPress. As that growth continues, the need for brand awareness will grow as well. This updated look not only puts Jetpack ahead of the curve, but also sets it up for success in the future.

Jetpack also got a few new powerful features that are worth taking a look at as well.

Jetpack Feature Updates

With each update that comes with Jetpack, there is almost always something ready to be unwrapped and utilized on your WordPress site. The last couple updates for Jetpack included new features like Site Verification, Related Posts, Gravatar Hover Cards, and a complete overhaul of the Jetpack Dashboard layout. This new update came with the nice touch of a new Custom Post Type (CPT) – specifically, a Portfolio Custom Post Type.

Although many WordPress Themes already have this Custom Post Type integrated into the theme, those that don’t will benefit the most from this new Jetpack feature. Thankfully, setting it up is easy.

After you activate the new features in your Jetpack Dashboard, you can then go to Settings–>Writing and enable the new option in your WordPress dashboard. (Easy!)

As an additional option, after you’ve activated and enabled the Custom Post Type on your site, you can then use a shortcode “portfolio” to display the portfolio on any given page. On the more technical side of things, the 3.1 update brought some new features to the table that many developers are sure to appreciate.

For example, you can now make videos that you have on your site responsive by adding a line of code to your functions.php file. You can find that line of code in this article here.

As Jetpack continues to become a growing part of the WordPress culture, I am sure that we will see more and more features added to help compliment WordPress Software as a whole. What about you guys? Any features or tweaks that you’d like to done to Jetpack? Be sure to comment below.