Why WordPress 3.0 Will Be So Good

Fresh on the heels of  WordCampSF many of us users, enthusiasts, business people and developers are anxiously waiting the forthcoming major release to WordPress.

Version 3.0 will bring about some much sought after functionality to the CMS/blogging platform that has seen tremendous growth in its user base within the past couple of years.

There are numerous enhancements, but here I’m going to focus on what I feel are the Big 3 (in no specific order).

1. Multi-Site

The functionality that was once only available to the WPMU (Multi-User) folks on a custom install of WordPress is now going to be available to everyone (irregardless of where you host your WordPress installation). Being able to have a multi-user site opens up tremendous functionality; including, but not limited to, having a hyper-local site where multiple authors contribute content on the site and each has their own look and feel. Also for those sites that need to expand their presence to satisfy various niches or topic areas, but still need to fit under one larger “site umbrella” this multi-site functionality is going to be a welcome addition.

Now, activating multi-user will require some back-end coding. It has been somewhat straight-forward during this beta phase and I expect there to be more automation and ease of setup once the final release hits.

2. Menu Management

While I am personally most excited about the multi-site capability, I must say that the new menu management system is running a close 2nd on my list of things to look forward to.

If you’re a user of WordPress themes from WooThemes you’ll be pretty familiar with this functionality as Automattic, the company behind WordPress, has worked with the WooThemes team and leveraged much of that flexibility into the 3.0 release.

With the new menu management you will have full control over your site’s navigation menus. Using a drag and drop administrative interface you’ll be able to include pages, categories, links (internal and external to your blog), etc. to your top navigation. Trust me, this is huge – I’ve already disabled 3rd-party plug-ins on some of my blogs that performed this functionality now that’s it’s going to be integrated into the core of WordPress.

Image via: http://www.mashable.com

3. Custom Post Types

This bit of functionality is important and with all the fanfare around some of the other new cool features, the importance of custom post types could get lost in the shuffle. So let me explain just why this is a big deal.

Today in WordPress, you can publish two types of content; either a post or a page. That’s fine and dandy, but incredibly limiting. Now with custom post types consider this; you have a a collection of content you want to publish that contains nothing but photos. Now imagine creating a custom post type for a photo gallery, for example, and have a fresh “custom” look and feel for photo galleries within your blog. Again, this alleviates the need of 3rd-party plug-ins that handled this capability since here it will be integrated directly into the core of WordPress.

I’ll throw one more in for posterity sake…

4. New Default Theme

Image via: http://www.blogohblog.com

Ah yes, Kubrick has run it’s course. I think I recall Matt saying at WordCampSF that the Kubrick default theme had been around for about 3 years. That’s way too long. The new default theme, aptly named 2010 brings about an incredibly clean look and feel and added functionality that complement what we can expect from version 3.0.

One of those components is the ability to have a custom background image for every page/category of your blog.

Again, with WordCampSF wrapping up and a productive two day code sprint immediately afterward it was good to see Beta 2 released to the user community. I know there are six WordCamps remaining on the calendar before the end of May, and if progress continues to happen as it has, we should see not only the release candidate but the final version before the end of June.