Top 7 New Features in WordPress 3.0
The heavily anticipated WordPress 3.0 launch is just around the corner with the WP development team releasing the second beta on May 6th. I’ve personally taken the beta for a spin and have found most of the updates minor but notable nonetheless, especially to hardcore WordPress fans like myself. The admin control panel is virtually the same (nearly identical compared to past transitions) and much of the fundamental inner-working remain the same. Changes and added functionalities include but are not limited to:
#1 Built-in support for post thumbnails (referred to as “featured images” in the post editing screen)
You can choose to associate each post or page with an image you specify. If the theme supports it, the image can be used to represent posts or pages, just like post teasers that appear on Blogtap’s frontpage are each represented with an image. Previously, with WordPress 2.8, a plugin was required to have such capabilities in a theme.
#2 Customizable menus
Under the Appearance tab, you can create menus and add internal (pages, categories, etc.) or external links to them with the click of a button. The menus appear as Widgets (named “Navigation Menu”) in the Widget control panel page and can be dragged and dropped into your active sidebar. The customizable menus were not working with the default theme in my version of the beta but I sent in a report.
#3 Custom post types
Much like what Tumblr has, you can create a post type specifically for things like podcasts, videos, photos, etc. I have not seen anything in the GUI yet but I am hoping it will not require any hard coding.
#4 Multi-site support
This means you can run multiple sites from one install of WordPress. Although this feature won’t be of use to most WordPress users, it will greatly simplify management for companies and organizations that have multiple blogs on one domain or across many.
#5 Comments in the Post Editor
The ability to see comments for a post while editing a post is ostensibly for easy access comment editing.
#6 The ability to change the default upload folder in Media Settings
You can set a full URL path to the files and select an option to organize uploads into month and year based folder.
#7 A New Default Theme
A new default theme with a built-in custom background changer (upload an image or define a color) and option to choose from custom header images (or upload your own).
Tags: blogging platforms, wordpress 3.0
[...] content on Blogtap does not meet that criteria (I doubt many of my friends have an interest in the top features in WordPress 3.0 or even know what WordPress is) so I will not be installing the Like button on this [...]