WordPress 3.0 – A First View

I have been using WordPress 3.0 for a little while now, mainly to test that the plugins I have developed still work in this new version. I am please to say that I have had very few problems.

I thought that I would give my first view of WordPress 3.0.

What is different in this version?

1. Custom Post Types
2. New Default Theme
3. Custom Background Support
4. Specific Templates for Authors
5. New Users Tutorial
6. Custom Woo Navigation added to the core
7. Merge of WordPress and the now defunct WordPress MU
8. Security Improvements with automatic creation of Security Keys

There are many other improvements, but these are mainly within the code and in the technical development of the software rather than up-front features.

The Install

WordPress can now be installed as a multi-site system very much like WordPress MU used to. I have yet to try this but will be investigating those features very soon as I use WordPress for many sites and it would be perfect if I can simply have one install to run them all rather than having to go through the process time and time again.

The normal WordPress install is very similar to the WordPress 2.x installs where it creates the configuration file, asking you for the username and password for the database and the database name. The main difference that I found was that it no-longer gives you a randomly generated admin password, but asks you to enter your password.

I think this is much better as it cuts out one step in the WordPress setup process, you no-longer have to go into the admin area and change the password to something sensible that you can remember. It does of course have the password strength indicator to ensure that you are not using a password of 1234!

The install still asks you for a name for your blog, but frustratingly does not ask you to change the Tag line. If this were added to the install process it would streamline the install even more. In my view if it added permalink settings as well this would be perfect and would mean that it is ready to go after the install rather than having to modify settings. I suppose the problem with this is that it would make the install process more cluttered but I would rather have that and know that once the install was finished WordPress was configured how I wanted it rather than having to go through the settings.

The WordPress install now checks the version of MySQL and PHP on the server. I always thought that this was something that it would do and it never occurred to me that it would not so this is very good news and long overdue. It is something that I have had in my plugins for some time now, checking to make sure that the server supports their requirements. This seems a basic thing that should have been introduced from the beginning of WordPress.

The WordPress Admin Interface

At first glance the WordPress admin interface looks very much the same. The theme has been updated a little, indeed the admin area is supposed to be easier to theme.

Updates: A large number of the changes included are the ability to do bulk updates, both WordPress plugins and themes now have the ability to have bulk updates, and the updates for WordPress its self have now moved onto the Dashboard.

Interestingly during the time it has taken since I installed WordPress 3.0 (2 hours ago) there has been an update, so I have gone through the update process to update WordPress to the latest nightly build and the process is exactly the same as the 2.9x automatically upgrade feature.

Custom Posts and Taxonomies: The introduction and improvement of custom posts and custom taxonomies will add much more functionality to WordPress and a huge amount of scope for building more advanced applications based on the WordPress Framework. I have not fully got my head round what is possible with these, but I intend to in the near future and I will try and post mu findings here.

Search Engines blocked Message: A very small but useful thing that I have noticed, as the install of WordPress 3.0 I have done is just a test install I noticed the box on the install which says allow search engines to see my blog, I now have a message in the top bar of the admin interface “Search Engines Blocked” a useful reminder, especially for me as I use many test installs of WordPress and am paranoid about domains or IP addresses being blocked for spamming when I am testing new scripts on those WordPress installs.

Revision interface: The interface that allows you to compare the revisions of a post within WordPress has been updated, the fact of the matter is that I did not know that this interface even existed, and when I compare the 2.9.2 and the WordPress 3.0 interfaces I can not see any difference, but this is defiantly a feature I will be using in the future.

Menu Management: WordPress 3.0 now has the Woo Navigation features integrated as core. This allows you to manage the menus on your WordPress via a drag and drop interface. It also means that you can make up custom menus that include both pages and categories, a very useful feature especially if you are using WordPress as a framework for a CMS or e-commerce site.

There are many other features and the list of new features for developers is apparently endless. I must get time to read the whole list and see what it means for WordPress developers and how I can use them to improve my WordPress Plugins.

Will I be upgrading?

Simple answer is yes, of course I will upgrade, the more detailed answer would be that I will upgrade my WordPress installs that have a blog on them such as this one, Earning From Affiliates and On the Allotment first. I will then start to move onto the other sites that use WordPress as a framework for e-commerce or affiliate sites. However, I want to investigate the multi site facilities before I do that to see if it is an easy task to move over to a single install of WordPress to manage all my sites.

Whats next?

You will have noted several times in this post that I have seen areas that I need to gen up on. Custom Posts and Custom Taxonomies specifically look like an area that will be of use to me in my WordPress Datafeed Import and WordPress Amazon Import Plugins. I have a load of work to do playing with these new features to discover what I can do, look out in the near future for exciting new features for my plugins.

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