WordPress this morning launched the Version 3.0 beta 1 for its beta testers. In a blog post by Jane Wells, she states that

This is an early beta. This means there are a few things we’re still finishing. We wanted to get people testing it this weekend, so we’re releasing it now rather than waiting another week until everything is finalized and polished.

So for all of our readers, we tested this beta release and found some really great new features which were much awaited by the wordpress users.

Installation

There has not much been changed in the installation of wordpress, it works similar to its previous releases. The only point which needs to be mentioned here is that

• You get to choose the Admin password before the actual installation takes place thus removing the headache of copy and pasting the long unmemorizable series of letters which wordpress generates in order to login to the admin panel for the first time. Take a look at the screenshot and you will know what we are talking about.

From the official blog post about this added feature:

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.

Merge Feature

Yes, with the release of WordPress 3.0, the WordPress and WordPress MU have merged. You can now create a series of websites running wordpress with just a single installation. This feature is still in its beta and by default it is not active in the beta 1 of wordpress 3.0

To test the above feature you will need to follow the steps mentioned below:

• Open wp_config.php in any text editor.
• Add the lines define (‘WP_ALLOW_MULTISITE’, true ) ; to it. This will enable the Network menu which can be under the Tools menu

To know more about this feature, head to WordPress Codex.

Default Theme

WordPress 3.0 will feature a new default theme Twenty Ten

• You can edit the Background of this new default theme by navigating to Appearance >> Background. Look at the screenshot below:



• Similarly there are whole lot of choices for the custom header, to choose one or upload your own just navigate to Appearance >> Header. Take a look at the screenshot below:

Custom Post Types

This is the coolest and really appreciable feature with this release of WordPress. Here is what Konstantin says about this feature in a blog post

Why would we want to play 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.

With the Custom Post Types, you can create posts (which you see in Tumblr) like

• Photo Posts
• Quotes
• Chats
• Audio/Podcasts
• Video

You can learn more about this feature at the wordpress codex

Custom Navigation

We all know WooThemes introduced a concept of Custom Navigation in its Theme Framework. Seeing this wordpress borrowed the code for custom navigation from Woothemes and here we have it in the 3.0 beta 1.

The feature lets you create a custom navigation bar wherein you can

• Add any number of menus.
• External Links.
• Any Category from your website.
• Any Page.
• Create drop down items.

You can learn about the custom navigation at Woothemes website.

Conclusion

So to conclude, WordPress 3.0 will bring a revolution to how we blog and what we blog. Thus all the wordpress users eagerly wait for the final release of version 3.0

If you happen to find any other great feature which we left out here then please let us know about it and also share with us whether you liked the above mentioned feature or not.

More Interesting Stories

• No Related Post