WordPress 3.0 Beta 1 Released – Now Tried and Tested

As you may all know WordPress has released a beta version of the WordPress 3.0 that is under development. This is a good news for WordPress lovers and bloggerss since we will be able to test out the features of the new version of the most using platform in the world. The stable version of WordPress 3.0 should be available till March.

This is good news after an already good news. The first good news being the Google Update today.  As word goes this version of WordPress comes with a lot of new features including a new default theme TwentyTen. And as far as I know the WordPress team are also getting help from the Woothemes team for the Menu development (woo nav – navigation bar). For those who do not recognize Woo Themes, they are one of the best WordPress theme development and designing company.

In this beta release, You should consider that:

• The custom menus system (Appearance > Menus) is not quite finished. In Beta 2, the layout will be different and a bunch of the functionality will be improved, but we didn’t want to hold things up for this one screen. You can play with making custom menus, and report bugs if you find them, but this is not how the final screen will look/work, so don’t get attached to it.
• The merge! Yes, WordPress and WordPress MU have merged. This does not mean that you can suddenly start adding a bunch of new blogs from within your regular WordPress Dashboard. If you’re interested in testing the Super Admin stuff associated with multiple sites, you’ll need some simple directions to get started.
• We’re still fiddling with a few small things in the UI, as we were focused on getting the more function-oriented code finished first. For example, we’re getting a new icon for the Super Admin section.

You can download the beta WordPress 3.0 for testing purposes here. Please do  not use it for live sites since it is a beta version and only meant for testing

WORDPRESS 3.0 TESTED

After getting the news of the release of WordPress 3.0 I felt the need to test it. So I installed it in an unused hosting account of mine and used a free .tk domain “http://www.wordpress3.tk   . I upload the files and started installed it. Lets see what new features does the WordPress 3.0 release brings with it.

Installation

Now you do not need to install with the default “admin” username, you can change it to anything you want, any username you want and any password.

Default blog URL:

The default blog URL after installation is http://www.wordpress3.tk instead of http://wordpress3.tk

Default Theme:

The TwentyTen default theme looks extremely awesome.

Change in theme Admin Menu

There has been a design change in the tabs of the theme  admin menu

Navigation Menu

A new way to add menu to your navigation bar. This feature has enabled adding a page, a category or an external link into the same navigation bar. Simplified maintain navigation menu.

Custom Post Types

Even though I  have not tested this feature live in the blog since it requires some editing of the code. But never the less have heard a lot about this feature. This feature will come helpful for people who install and customize WordPress Clients. You wont need to learn  how to fiddle around with custom fields, or add stupid meta boxes in the Edit Posts page and then teach our clients and/or content managers to use them? Why not just get rid of all those stuff and have them seperately in your main menu, and the meta boxes are customized to match the exact needs of certain post types.

Instead now you can add posts in the form of a catalog, like an excel spreadsheet containing columns for adding information.

As source kovshenin.com writes about the Custom Posts Function in his blog Post:

Say you run an online store which of course has some static Pages (such as Contact, About, etc), some blog Posts, cause we’re so 2.0, remember? And Products, which would be a custom post type that contains the product name, description, product price, stock availability, and could even contain inquiries in forms of user comments!

One more example – a Real Estate Agency, same story – Pages, Blog Posts, News stories, property For Sale, property For Rent, Land for sale. The last three would contain extra taxonomy in forms of Country, Region. Custom fields such as price, total area, etc. The Edit Property page could even contain a Google Map where you could point out its location! Here’s a screenshot:

To read more about how to add custom post types read at Kovshenin.com

Source: Kovshenin.com

Multi User – WordPress and WordPress – MU Integretion.

Now this is the most awaited feature using this you can make a network of blog under the same domain.

For example through my single installation www.wordpress3.tk I can allow any other user to have a new blog at www.new.wordpress3.tk or at www.wordpress3.tk/new and I will not need to install WordPress again and again in the new sub folders. This allow us to make a blog network like Blogger.com or WordPress.com

By default this features is disabled, we can enable it by adding

 define ('WP_ALLOW_MULTISITE', true  ) ;

to the wp-config.php file

This will enable the Network menu item to appear in the Tools menu.

You need to do some bit of work before you will be able to provide blogs on your domain to users. To read more about how to install a network in WordPress 3 check this tutorial out.

Category to Tag and Tag to Category Conversion

Yes using this feature you can convert your blogs individual categories to tag and tags to categories

You can check out my installed demo at http://www.wordpress3.tk . I an even give you admin access if you want to play around a bit with the admin panel for testing purposes. Just contact me at androidwebsolutions@gmail.com.

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Category: Scripts, Wordpress News