One of the great benefits of open source publishing platforms is they provide a steady stream of upgrades and improvements. Case in point is the latest WordPress enhancement to reader comments in that integrates social media login options.

What that means is you can now use your WordPress.com, Twitter, or Facebook account when leaving a comment so no more requiring users to create user accounts or have a Gravatar account in order to display user images etc.

The new interface is wonderfully minimalistic in that you don’t initially see any login fields. In fact, you might get thrown off by the lack of name/email/URL fields.

No worries, all you have to do is start typing away and the login options appear automatically.

You can login or enter your accreditation credentials at any point while leaving a comment. If you use one of the social media login options, the system will automatically pull your user info from the respective outlet. In this example, I’ve logged in using my Twitter account.

Granted, this isn’t exactly new technology but compared to most of the other publishing platforms that provide functionality like this, this new WordPress version looks, feels, and functions quicker with an intuitive experience. All in all, it should provide most readers with a far more convenient way to login via social media accounts when leaving comments.

The last bit of new functionality to cover is the ability to change the default “Leave a Reply” text. At first, it seemed like a no-brainer but the more I think about it, the more I drew a blank so I’m going to toss it out there to readers to see if anyone can come up with a clever replacement for the bureaucratically correct default content.

*Yawn* What’s better than Leave a Reply?