Those of you who actively look at what kind of news is presented to you in your WordPress dashboard already know WordPresss 3.0 beta 1 is released just before the weekend. Even though the actual release of WordPress 3.0 will be at least a couple of weeks away, it’s good to be prepared to the new stuff which WordPress 3.0 will bring to the table.
You of course already knew WordPress 3.0 will be sporting a brand new default theme, named Twenty Ten, but there are quite a few more new features that can improve your WordPress experience. Instead of listing every single feature, I thought it would be nice to make a list of those who already wrote about WordPress 3.0.
Custom Post Types
The Custom Post Type feature will make it possible to have a certain type of post show up with only those features that you really need when writing a post. I think Dougal sums it up very nicely:
A nice feature of custom post types is that you can customize which pieces of the editor appear for them. Don’t need excerpts? Turn them off. Don’t need post thumbnails (I mean “featured images”) or custom fields? Turn them off. Want to just use the excerpt field, and eliminate the WYSIWYG editor? You can do that.
More reading on Custom Post Types
- First Impressions of Custom Post Type
- Custom Post Types in WordPress 3.0
- Custom Post Type UI Plugin for WordPress
- Extending Custom Post Types in WordPress 3.0
Menu
There’s been a lot of talk about new Menu feature and the way it looks now is certainly not set in stone yet, but you get a pretty good feel of what the WordPress 3.0 Menu function will look like after having looked at this video.
Multisite / Network
One of the first things we knew about WordPress 3.0 is that is would merge the stand-alone version of WordPress with the Multi User version we all know as WordPress MU. Alongside with Custom Post Types this to me is the best feature of WordPress 3.0.
More info can be found here
Custom Background
A very clever feature which will find it’s way to a lot of themes, I’m sure, is the custom background feature. With this feature you can quite easily change the background of your design by simply uploading a preferred image and activating it. Twenty Ten already has this feature built in.
Conclusion
I haven’t even scratched the surface when it comes to the total list of all the new stuff WordPress 3.0 will bring us, but I’m sure there’s plenty of information available behind all the links in this post that will help you get a good feel of what WordPress 3.0 is going to do for you. Should you be interested in all the new features than be sure to check out the WordPress 3.0 on the Codex. If you want to help out testing be sure to download the beta and any and all bugs you encounter can be reported via the wp-testers mailing list.
This article first appeared on BloggingPro: Get Ready for WordPress 3.0
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