7 New things coming with WordPress 3.0

category: News | Tags: featured.

Default Theme

Let’s begin with something that waited to be updated a lot of time. The default theme. Wave goodbye to Kubrick and say hello to 2010. Rumors say that the dev team wants to include a new theme every year.

Some of the features of this theme are going to be: Custom Header and Background, Many widget areas, Cascading menus etc.

Custom Post Types

The next big thing in wordpress development is coming with version 3. We already wrote about this featuer with extended documentation on how to work with custom post types.

Now it is far easier to create a custom post type for your website. Not only that, but you can also assign new custom taxonomies to this type.

Custom Navigation

If you are not an advanced user or you want the easy way to create a custom menu, this feature is heaven. The dev team merged the Custom Woo Navigation, and now we will be able to create menus by combining pages, categories, external links and of course you can have as many levels as we want.

Merge of WordPress MU + WordPress.org

No, WordPress is not going to become multi-site (or multi-user) by default. If you’re running a simple site, nothing is going to change for you. Also nothing is going to change if you’re already running an MU site.

The new thing is that the platform will be the same. Swithing to MultiSite will be a matter of some code addition.
Wordpress MultiSite will allow webmasters to have multiple website, but only under ONE domain. (example: wpspecial.net, sub1.wpspecial.net, sub2.wpspecial.net etc)

The feature where you can add a new site with a different Top-Level Domain will NOT be added (at least for now).

Author Specific Templates

With wordpress 2.9 the new thing was specific page templates, just be adding a new php file (example: page-slug.php)
Now this feature comes also to authors. Simple like this: author-name.php

Choose Username When Installing WordPress

For me this change was a must, for security reasons. Now we will be able to choose the admin username, when installing wordpress for the first time.

Welcome Guide in Every Installation

Although many advanced users will not find this feature useful, many low-level users mention this problem. By the time they log in for the first time, they had now welcome screen to help them find their way inside. Now they will be happy.