WordPress 3.0 is projected to be released on May 1st, the same day as WordCamp San Francisco. Since I recently moved to San Francisco, I’m hoping to attend again this year!
Merge of WordPress + WordPress MU
WordPress MU is a similar platform to WordPress except it allows users to run multiple sites under one installation. WordPress.com is running on WordPress MU code base. Founder Matt Mullenweg announced the merge news during WordCamp San Francisco 2009 (I was there!)
What does this mean for you?
You can now have multiple sites in one installation. Say you have 10 different sites, you don’t need 10 different installations of wordpress. Particularly handy when upgrading. WordPress MU users will now be able to use all WordPress.org plugins without hacking them.
Search Across All Your Sites – If you do decide to have numerous sites under one install, cross network search would be a very handy outcome of this, it’s not in the core yet but it may be in the near future. You can use the plugin to make it work for now.
Preview:
Custom Post Types
This feature will allow you to have different type of posts for example Portfolio listings, Products, and then Normal blog posts. Combining Post Types and Taxonomies will make WordPress a much more robust CMS option. Check out First Impression of WordPress Post Types by Frank of WPEngineer for more on this.
Better Navigation Menus
Custom Woo Navigation will be included to the core in this release in order to allow for better menu management. This menu system has the drag and drop ease of the widget management screen. It also allows the ability of re-ordering, along with submenus, and hiding specific Pages or Categories from the menu altogether. Kudos to Woo Staff for contributing this system to the core.
Preview:
New Default Theme 2010
Bye Bye Kubrick Theme! Welcome 2010. WordPress 3.0 will come with a new default theme known as 2010. From this year on, the goal is to have a new theme for every year! Wondering what the new 2010 theme would look like? (Just click on the image below to see the live version.)
Custom Background Support
Kind of a twitter-background like feature. Support for custom background can be called by adding this line in your functions.php: add_custom_background();
You’ll see a screen in your admin panel to upload a custom background image which will replace the default grey background (only works on 2010 theme & others that support this feature for now).
Author Specific Templates
In WordPress 3.0, you can create specific templates for each author. The function get_author_template(); has been expanded in wp-includes/theme.php.You would be able to name files like author-syed.php.
Ability to Choose Username When Installing WordPress
As of now, WordPress automatically assigns the first user with the username “admin”. If you have read any articles on WordPress security, you know the importance of this feature. Now the hackers cannot guess your username because it will no longer be “admin”.
Canonical Plugins
Have you used a plugin that you loved, and the author stopped providing support. No bug fixes, no upgrades, and the plugin eventually breaks in newer versions. Canonical plugins are developed by a community instead of one developer, so if one person steps down, the plugin does not die. Using the open source development model basically.
[via wpbeginner.com]