Mogul

WordPress 3.0

BY Bren Faulknor-Murrell | July 23, 2010

On June 17 2010, the folks over at WordPress released the much anticipated WordPress 3.0 to the collective joy of developers worldwide.

Now without sounding completely like a broken record it should be pointed out that we at Mogul are complete WordPress evangelists.  We don’t just build WordPress, we live and breathe it.  So given the opportunity to give 3.0 a test drive we were chomping at the bit.  And we can tell you now that it delivers.

So what’s new?

There’s a whole new raft of “out of the box” features that WordPress 3.0 provides users and developers alike.  Here’s what really excites us:

• Custom content types – previously limited to posts for a blog or pages for the rest of the site, WordPress steps up into the realm of true CMS by allowing the creation of any post type imaginable.   Product catalog, anyone?  Real Estate listings? Employee list?
• Custom Taxonomies – for those familiar with WordPress you’ll know about categories and tags – custom taxonomies allow us to create limitless ways to include meta data about your content.
• Integrated Mutli-user – Need multiple blogs? Previously a separate project, WordPress now comes with WPMU (WordPress Multi-User) completely integrated.  With the addition of the BuddyPress plugin it’s now even possible to develop your own social network.
• Custom menus – it’s now possible to add almost any type of content to a single navigation menu

If you’re anything like me, reading about it isn’t really learning about it.  So here’s the official WordPress propaganda:

I’m so glad you’re excited about it, Mogul, but…

…what does it all mean?  Well, from our point of view it feels that the somewhat rigid structure of the already brilliant WordPress has just taken a turn for the better, sleeker and more flexible.  This means we can now develop an even more fluid and extensible site that better suits your requirements.  There’s also a number of improved backend processes that make managing your site almost even easier than before.

How we’re using it

We’ve upgraded a number of sites to WordPress 3.0 already and we’ve even built one site from the ground up using WordPress 3.0 as a base.  Before we really got our teeth sunk into a feature packed 3.0 site though we wanted to make sure that this new version still catered to the basic needs of our clients.  And it does.  Amazingly well, as always.

We’ve got a few great 3.0 sites in the pipeline already, so watch this space.  However, if you have a project that needs that extra level of customisation then you need to talk to us now!