I had a chance to install the recently released WordPress 3 Beta 1 onto my PC and I thought I’d highlight some of the most notable (in my opinion at least) new features that you can expect. For a more comprehensive list of improvements, head on over the 3.0 features page on the Wordpress Codex
- Most significant – merge with WordPress MU, which means everyone (with the right hosting setup) will be able to host more than one blog instance off one installation. More on that soon….
- Installation
- Admin passwords are now set during installation.
- Add/Edit Post/Page Improvements
- Ability to add a featured image to a post or page
- Post Types : you can now “categorize” your posts even further by giving them post type attributes and adding further meta data on top of that via taxonomies. Currently, WP3.0 Beta 1 does not offer a UI for this, but have a look at the Custom Post Type UI plugin and watch the video on that page for a good grasp of what’s possible.
- Themes
- Menu management. You can now completely sort your menu including adding category pages, external links. If you’d like something to make your menu sorting easy for 2.x page menus, try out pageMash (only allows sorting of your pages, but has a similar concept to the 3.0 functionality).
- New default theme, Twenty Ten, which is now the only bundled theme. Old themes still available from the built in theme installer.
- Custom templates for post types and individual authors.
- Plugins
- When adding a plugin, the list of plugins now has a details and install now link on the right hand side. Previously, this was one link that went to the author plugin page. Nice for us plugin developers but not very intuitive for users (and power users like myself)
All I can say about 3.0 is so far so good! I look forward to further Betas