BootStrap

As most of you know, WordPress 3.0 has been released. Although it’s still in a beta release stage, it’s working out really well and alot of the major bloggers have taken it for a test drive, checking out the many new features that are available. Many of us already know use WordPress for many things other than just basic blogging, but with this release, people will see how they can start managing content even more effortlessly than before and using WordPress as more than just a blog.

WordPress was first released in 2003 as a Content Management System targeted at bloggers, and today it is regarded as the most popular blogging platform available. WordPress is constantly being upgraded with new features that make it possible to use it as a customized full website CMS rather than just a blogging platform. Many famous blogs and even enterprise level business sites are using WordPress as their CMS: WSJ, Nikon, Pepsi, etc. No doubt about it, WordPress 3.0 has extended the possibilities for creating a full website with a user-friendly CMS for clients.

New Menu Management Feature

This by far is one of the most exciting new features in WordPress 3.0, and it’s included in the default installation. Before this, it was possible to create dynamic menus with some plugins and/or WordPress ninja skills. But never was it this easy to accomplish.

Pages, categories, custom website links are a few things you can add. With the custom website links option, you can link straight to a post, another website, anything. It’s user-friendly and setup similar to the current sidebar widget area where dragging and dropping to customize it is easily done. Just the way you like.

Custom Post Types

For now, you can only create pages and posts with WordPress. In 3.0, you can create your own custom post types, and set up the appropriate fields to go along with each. As a user chooses a new post type, e.g. Podcast, they will just add a podcast, simple as that. You wouldn’t need to walk your clients through a complicated process and explain why and how they need to add a new post for a podcast and click on a category and fill in a certain custom field. It’s just 1-step now, and clients will love the simplicity. It does require the use of a plugin, but before 3.0 it required much more work to setup

Multi-User

WordPress Multi-User has been around, but has always been as a separate entity and it will be integrated in 3.0. MU allows you to maintain multiple sites from a single admin panel. It’s great for anyone that runs more than one site / blog and would like the accessibility and simplicity of logging in once and maintaining them all from one place. I’m sure the people who are running sites that share content, templates or plugins would love this.

To clarify, this isn’t completely setup in the default installation, but it’s fairly easy to setup and get going. First add this line to wp-config.php:

define(‘WP_ALLOW_MULTISITE’, true);

Now the “Network” options will appear under the Tools menu. Once it does, fill in the Network Title, Admin Email Address, and press Install. WordPress will give you the option to set these sites up under sub domains or sub directories. If you’ve installed this version of WordPress in a sub directory, sub-domain or you’re using localhost, WordPress requires that you use sub directories.

Other Noteworthy Features

You can now choose your own username and password in the installation process, no more auto-generated passwords using the admin username

Oh, and the new default theme “Twenty Ten” is much more…subtle. It’s clean with minimal style attributes.

This entry was posted on Thursday, June 24th, 2010 at 10:23 pm

and is filed under Articles .
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