Important Features' Updates in Wordpress Version 3.0

Wordpress 3.0 Features:

1. Custom Post Types
2. Menu Management
3. Custom Taxonomies
4. New Default Theme: “Twentyten”
5. Multi-site

a. Custom Post Types

By default, WordPress lets you publish two types of content: "Posts" and "Pages". In version 3.0, you can define additional content types with their own attributes. For example, if you’re running a WordPress site for a design agency, you might create a custom post type to display portfolio items, another for employee pages, and another for client testimonials. From there, you can customize your theme to better suit each individual post type.

You might even want to turn your WordPress site into something more like Tumblr. This will be easy to do in WordPress 3.0 simply by creating custom post types for Text, Photo, Quote, Link, Chat, Audio, and Video.

b. Menu Management

Menu management is one of the most exciting and talked about features in WordPress 3.0. This feature gives you full control over your site’s navigation menus. With an easy drag and drop interface, users can create menus that include any mixture of links to internal pages, external URLs, categories, you name it. Then you can embed these custom menus as a widget wherever your theme allows.

c. Custom Taxonomies

While this new feature may seem a bit complex to non-developers, it certainly brings WordPress 3.0 closer to a true CMS. Custom taxonomies allow you to create additional pieces of meta information. By default, there are "Categories" and "Tags". Now we can add additional types, with the option of being hierarchical or not.

For example, if you are a film fanatic and you use your WordPress blog to post reviews and rate new movies. You can create a custom taxonomy for "Rating", etc.,.

d. New Default Theme: “Twentyten”

Twentyten is the long-overdue default theme packaged with new installations of WordPress 3.0. It features a clean, yet bold design and introduces some nice functionality not found in many themes. Two features built into Twentyten are particularly useful if you’re new to WordPress and don’t have the coding skills to customize your theme. They are:

• Custom Header Image
• Custom Background Image

e. Multi-site

You can’t discuss WordPress 3.0 without mentioning the new multi-site capabilities. That is, you can manage several different websites (with different domains and/or sub-domains) all with a single installation of WordPress. What was previously known as WordPress MU (Multi-User) is now merged with the core WordPress system in 3.0. Enabling multi-site capabilities likely isn’t something for the average user, as it requires some tinkering with the code and configuring server settings. That said, the average user likely isn’t interested in having multi-site capabilities.

For more information, please visit: http://mashable.com/2010/05/10/new-features-wordpress-3/