The long awaited release of WordPress 3.0 has finally arrived today. June 18 2010 marks the beginning of the 3rd generation of WordPress. I’m excited to say the least – so excited I upgraded the Bara’ Design website quick-smart; but more about that soon.

What’s New?

To the average user, there’s probably not much that will be noticed. I mean the design is still very similar – just a lighter header. But to the WordPress developers and daily users, there’s a lot to love. I’m referring to this version as ‘convenience’ – as all the features are to improve the convenience of use.

• New API’s for theme developers, including:
  • Custom backgrounds
  • Custom headers
• Shortlinks – with social networking like Twitter, shortlinks are becoming so common. Having them built in allows WordPress users to be able to quickly and very easily share their links! How convenient.
• Post types – a WordPress user can specify different post types – such as ‘real estate listings’ and this will act as a ‘type of post’ appearing in the admin navigation. I can see this coming in handy for the Bara’ Design portfolio!
• WordPress and MU merge – website admins who manage many installs of WordPress will find this handy as you can now have 10 million websites under one WordPress install!
• Menus! – this is my favourite – there is no more editing header files with extra <li> tags because a client wants a random link in the mix! WordPress now has custom menus so that a user can create a new menu by dragging and dropping pages! How convenient! I’ve been waiting for this one for a long time

On top of these features, there were over 1,000 bug fixes – Good work WordPress community. Check out the video at the end.

Upgrading

I wasn’t sure if to upgrade so soon. I did some Googling and couldn’t find anyone with issues. I did what any good developer would do – I backed up the database and all the files > then upgraded. Within 10 seconds it had completely upgraded After about 2 hours of testing – no problems. It just works.

I’m looking forward to using the wp_nav_menu()

The Bara’ View on WordPress

WordPress is the CMS of choice by over 10 300 000 website owners worldwide. It started out as a blog, however over 13 major releases, was formed and shaped into a content management system with a powerful blog. Many, aged web developers still refer to WordPress as a blog however this is a naive statement to make. If these people actually tried it, understood its capabilities and ease of use, they’d no doubt be converted. We use it here at Bara’ Design, and haven’t had a single issue to date. Clients love the simplicity of use + powerful options, we love the ease of development, and open-ness to community extensions. Hey look, right now WordPress is telling me that it ‘saved my draft’ – just like MS Word does…how convenient