I am not a techy by training or nature, so I am always looking for tools which allow me to play in the tech community. Two and a half years ago, I discovered WordPress, and for me it was a game changer.
Using WordPress as a content management system, we can design, professional looking, simple to use websites for our small business clients. The ever growing list of plugins has allowed us to create more and more robust sites, with features comparable to custom-designed sites available at significantly higher price points. – So to put it mildly, I am a WordPress Fan.
With each update, there are more and more features which make my job easier and simplify the lives of our clients. And now, WordPress 3.0 is scheduled for release on Monday. How much better will this new version be? The early reports from the Beta testers hints at some terrific new features:
- Custom Post Types: In the old version you could create posts and pages, now you can create additional formats for specific types of information, testimonials, FAQ’s, customer or employee profiles, the list of possiblities is as long as the types of companies who might use it.
- Author Posts: On multi author blogs like this one, each author can have their own “style” . While site owners should still control over all look and feel to maintain brand integrity, this should allow for a bit more personality to come through. I am really excited about this particular feature for the roundpeg blog as each member of my team begins to write more and more content.
- Menu Management: In the older version, ordering pages and sub pages had to be managed within each post. Adding a page was easy, but getting it into the correct spot on the navigation could be a pain, especially if you had multiple pages. Having one main
- Sidebar Footer Widgets: We frequently use Studio press themes because of this feature which allows us to create content rich footers which appear on each page. I am excited to see this included into 3.0 as a standard.
- Merging Single Site and Multisite: While my clients won’t care, this is going to be a huge improvement for us, as we add more and more sites. Switching to a MU format will allow us to update plugins and content once, not over and over again!
There are so many other exciting features with this upgrade! I can’t wait to try them all. Would love to know what you like best as you begin to work with the newest version.
*DONT_KNOW* It will be interesting to see what ‘flavor’ of MU they integrate. Multi-domain was not a core feature of MU and was difficult to implement (we did a 14 site implementation) and some of the features weren’t as smooth (like installing the plugins across all networks never seemed to work). I would caution against using MU to host multiple clients in the same instance, it would require you to move ALL clients in the event that one needed migrated to a faster server environment, or they wanted to eventually host their own.