This video from the WordPress team also explains some of the new features.
WordPress 3.0, the latest and greatest version of the popular open source content management system, has been released. The latest version brings a refined backend interface, a brand new default theme, a new custom menu structure, plus improved support for custom post types and custom taxonomies. It’s the result of six months of work from a total of 218 different contributors. You can download it now or upgrade from within your WordPress dashboard.
Menu management is one of the most exciting and talked about features in WordPress 3.0. This feature gives you full control over your site’s navigation menus. With an easy drag and drop interface, users can create menus that include any mixture of links to internal pages, external URLs, categories, you name it. Then you can embed these custom menus as a widget wherever your theme allows.
Here are some must-read posts about menus and how to best implement and customize them in your themes:
Templatic has a thorough guide to all things menus, including how to add support for custom menus to your themes.
Ivor Padilla has a great tutorial for how to create menus that have customize labels and images.
Justin Tadlock covers how to implement custom menus into your themes and gives some styling tips and suggestions.
New2WP offers some tips for adding menu support to your theme, while also remaining backwards compatible with older versions of WordPress.
Multisite MadnessOn the code side of WordPress 3.0, one of the most significant changes is that the codebases for WordPress Multi User (WordPress MU) and WordPress have merged. This means that they are no longer maintained as separate projects, and that the same base is used whether you are running one site or hundreds off of an installation.
Most users, even advanced users, won’t use the multisite features built into WordPress 3.0, but for those that are looking at rolling out a large number of blogs, the fact that the project is now unified is great, great news.
A lot of the changes on the WordPress Multisite side have been with terminology. A lot of the terminology has changed, which can genuinely make things confusing.
Fortunately, plenty of smart WordPress community members have written some great guides about getting started and getting the most out of WordPress Multisite.
Deluxe Blog Tips has a guide for setting up and enabling Multisite in WordPress 3.0 that takes you through the entire process.
WordPress contributor Otto has written a great guide about domain mapping in Multisite mode in WordPress 3.0.
The excellent WPMU Tutorials has a fantastic guide on how to upgrade from WordPress MU to WordPress 3.0 Multisite.
Custom Post Types GaloreOne of the features that many developers (and designers) are most excited about in WordPress 3.0 is enhanced and improved custom post types. To me, this feature (along with custom taxonomies) is what is finally making WordPress viable as a content management system in the more traditional sense.
Custom post types basically mean that you can create rules based on the type of content you are adding or creating and that these rules will define how they are displayed. For instance, with custom post types, creating robust event calendars inside WordPress or creating a portfolio showcase can be much, much simpler and easier to manage.
Here are some resources for learning more about custom post types and how to best use them in your WordPress sites:
Once again, Justin Tadlock gives a nice overview of how custom post types work and some of the cool things they can do. He also explains how to implement them within WordPress.
Likewise, Otto has an equally good overview of what should and should not be a custom post type and how to use them in your design and development process.
Voosh Themes has an excellent real-world tutorial for using custom post types to create a professional portfolio. This is the sort of tutorial I love, because it is applicable to many real-world use cases.
Soma Design has created a Smarter Post Types plugin that makes the out-of-the-box custom post types even better. This lets you easily create custom landing pages for post types and custom single page templates.
Kovshenin has another real-world tutorial for extending custom post types, including creating metaboxes and making it easy to be able to query based on post type.
Nettuts+ has a great overview of custom post types and gives some suggestions for how it can be used.
Mike Van Winkle has an article about theming custom post types.
WP Storm has an article about the different editor styles that you can customize for your custom post types.
Custom Taxonomies TrickeryAnother new — and much wanted — feature of WordPress 3.0 is the ability to add custom taxonomies. Basically a taxonomy is a way to group or sort content — it can be hierarchical (that is, ordered) or non-hierarchical in structure.
WordPress treats post types, tags and categories all as taxonomies, but getting them to behave and work in a certain way hasn’t always been easy. That’s why custom taxonomy support has so much promise.
OK, here are some resources for wrapping your mind around custom taxonomies:
The brilliant Joost de Valk wrote about custom taxonomies last year. While some of what he writes is no longer true for the latest version of WordPress, this is a really, really good overview of what taxonomies are and how custom taxonomies work.
WordPress zen master, Justin Tadlock, once again lays out a very easy to understand overview and refresher on custom taxonomies and what is new in WordPress 3.0.
1st Web Designer just published a really fantastic guide to custom taxonomies in WordPress 3.0. Again, we like this because it gives some great real-world use cases.
Likewise, Nettuts+ has a great guide to using and understanding custom taxonomies in WordPress 3.0.
What Else?
Here are a few of the minor feature enhancements arriving in WordPress 3.0:
Get Shortlink (with your own domain)
We all know how useful URL shorteners can be, especially for tweeting links. WordPress 2.9 gave you the ability to use the wp.me URL shortener. WordPress 3.0 takes this feature a step further by allowing you to get a shortlink for your post based on your own domain name. For example: http://mashable.com/?post=7127. You don’t need to mask your URL with other services like bit.ly Now you can keep your branding intact when you tweet your links.
Author Templates
New in 3.0 is the ability to create unique author templates. This is great if you’re running a multi-author blog and you’d like to apply unique styles or layouts to individual author pages.
Select Username and Password During Installation
Before WordPress 3.0, new installations automatically set your master account to username “admin” with an auto-generated password. Now, you can define these during installation, saving you the hassle of changing them later. It also adds a new layer of security. WordPress sites have been known to be compromised simply because they use the most common username, “admin.”
