After months of developer community anticipation and beta releases, WordPress 3.0 is finally out in the wild. WordPress updates the core code several times a year for maintenance reasons, but this iteration has some pretty significant improvements that have got the Terralever developers of the WordPress persuasion (myself included) pretty excited.
If you don’t know what WordPress is, it’s a powerful, lightweight, flexible CMS. It’s evolved from a powerful blog tool (which it still is), into a tool that can power myriad websites with varying content and technical requirements. Terralever has built several websites with WordPress as a backend content management system, including the award-winning Ashley Fiolek site we recently built for Red Bull at http://www.ashleyfiolek.com.
There are a few new features that have me excited about the new version of WordPress, both from a development perspective and an end-user perspective.
- Child Themes
- Built-In Menu Support
- Custom Post Types
- and last but not least…Multiple Site Support!
One major limitation that’s been lifted by WordPress 3.0 is support for “child themes,” which are themes that inherit functionality and styling from, you guessed it, a Parent Theme. This gives you the flexibility to create variations of your base theme (such as creating a seasonal, holiday, or promotional theme). It’s also helpful for developers who do a lot of WordPress development, and want to use a base theme with common resources for each build, but don’t want to have to modify the core code of the theme. When a WordPress site utilizes µ (WordPress MU) functionality, child themes can be utilized to provide variations of a base theme for the different site instances.
One good indication that a feature should be included in the core, is how many plugins have been developed to deliver a basic piece of functionality. A perfect example is built-in menu support (Just search the plugin repository <http://wordpress.org/extend/plugins/search.php?q=menu&sort=> for “menu”). Previously, there wasn’t a whole lot available out-of-the box in terms of building a dynamic navigation menu based on your site’s page taxonomy. However, in WordPress 3.0, it’s simple for non-technical admins to manage the organization of their navigation through the backend. The new interface provides a means to quickly create menu items, and drag/drop them into their proper hierarchy. As long as your theme has support for this new feature, you should see immediate results. If you want to take it for a drive, look for the ‘menus’ option under the Appearance menu in the WordPress admin.
Custom Post Types are especially interesting to me, since we use WordPress to power such a diversity of sites with varying content requirements. Essentially, this feature addresses a need that’s been handled previously by users creating posts and categorizing them in categories such as “portfolio” or “products,” or otherwise creating a custom plugin to manage content. Custom Posts allow developers and admins to more effectively manage different types of content on their site, by organizing them under their type of post, alongside similar posts in the admin. This opens the door to something like turning your WordPress site into an ecommerce site, or a collection of any other type of data that can be administered through the post editing interface.
And perhaps my favorite new feature, is that WordPress µ (Multi User) support is built into WordPress 3. If you need to create a bunch of WordPress sites, and you don’t want to get a separate server for each one, this feature is your friend. Each site built off of this base can be managed by administrators that only have access to that specific site, but the super admin can access all sites on the WordPress µ install. Themes and plugins can be shared from the root of your site with each of the individual sites, so it now becomes very easy to manage updates and maintenance to your codebase across multiple domains.
And that’s just a few of the new features in WordPress 3.0. For a full list of new features, visit:
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Good Article
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