WordPress 3.0 was released this April, albeit a beta version. Good news, nonetheless. For months, developers have been waiting with bated breath for the latest version of WP which offers significant changes from its previous versions. Till now they had to be content with new releases which were mostly security fixes and went largely unnoticed by the not so savvy WP developer. So what's new in 3.0? Let's take a brief look

WordPress 3 theme

Kubrick has been shipped with WordPress since version 1.5 and it’s been around for five years since the default theme was changed. Back then, Kubrick was a thing of beauty with rounded corners and a pleasant feel to it. It wouldn't be surprising if some WP users thought that the bluish theme was developed by WordPress, which actually was contributed by Stanley Kubrick.
          
But WP 3.0 has brought a new theme called “2010” based on the theme Kirby. The theme looks cleaner, wider and brighter than Kubrick and is minimalist at the same time. The theme feel can be customized in many ways from the admin too.

WordPress 3 navigation

WP isn't popular for the customization of its navigation system, though lots of plugins   are available, and it was about time that they introduced some new feature.

The new navigation system was developed and integrated into WP by WooThemes, a WP theme development company. The navigation is very intuitive with support for adding, pages, posts, categories, external URLs, hierarchies, etc. Drag and drop makes creating menus a matter of minutes. Multiple menus are also supported.

WordPress and WordPress MU ( Mutli User)

WP MU is a fork of WP which is used to run multiple blogs using the same installation. WP 3.0 supports the integration of the two. WordPress.com actually runs on WP MU, which isn't hard to guess.

With 3.0, the codebases of the two will be merged, thus WP MU won't exist as a separate project. This means that, many features restricted to MU will be available with WP, such as BuddyPress and MU will get access to all the plugins available in the single user WP, all in all, making WP stronger, though more cluttered.

WordPress 3 custom Post Types(CPT)

Last, but not the least, the most important feature of WP 3.0. Though it may not be clear at first sight, this is the one that's going to change how people view WP. Till now WP was a blogging software with some bits thrown to accomplish a CMS with the help of pages, and of course lots of plug-ins which hack the core files for adding custom data blocks. But Custom Post Types makes WP more of an actual CMS like Drupal, or Joomla.
 
CPT can be appreciated with an example. Till 3.0 the only post types that were allowed in WP were posts and pages. Posts were used to add blog contents, while pages took care of the CMS. But pages were limited, because you had to enter all your data into a single content block inside the page. Plugins could fix this problem by providing more content blocks. But issues such as compatibility with other plugins, mainly editors like FCKEditor existed. Plug-ins wouldn't sometimes work when WP was upgraded.
 
So how does CPT solve such issues? With this feature, you can add any kind of content type. Suppose you have a website which reviews movies. Instead of adding movie details in a page, and then adding details such as name, duration, rating, etc. using custom fields, which is quite a hassle, you can create a new content type called Movie. There are functions to register the Movie content type, and some actual coding, which can be dealt in detail some other day.
 
Once you create the Movie post, you could have separate fields for entering data such as Movie-images, cast, duration, description. You could create a custom taxonomy for Movies such as Rating, instead of using the default Categories or Tags taxonomy of WP. This is just an example to show how CPT can be used to manage data more elegantly. Its use is limited only by your imagination.
 
With its new features WordPress 3.0 is in a position to take on the mighty Drupal as a proper CMS, and will help in shedding inhibitions developers might have about its CMS capabilities.

Our own website is done using WordPress and surely CPT is one feature we would be looking forward to!

WordPress Team @ Software Associates