Three Wise Men

Image by koka_sexton via Flickr

New major release of WordPress is coming our way. Current release is marked as WordPress 3.0 beta1. We will take a look at what is new and if the new is good or bad. And we will provide screen shots in our quick preview, we promise.

Upgrading WordPress is always something that we don’t take so lightly. A typical website based on WordPress, it could be a blog or not, will have a lot of plugins installed, some widgets and a more or less customized theme, sometimes perhaps even a custom made theme. Upgrading a minor version is a minor pain which means that upgrading a major version will be a major pain. That is why we did this just for you. So that our site will be broken first and you can see where we went wrong. Read on if you want to see how we handled the upgrade.

Of course we are not that silly¹ to play on our main site, so we did it on our test site.

Upgrade was smooth, the usual delete everything except wp-config.php and wp-content/ worked for us. More detailed upgrade step by step instructions would follow these steps:

• Login as Admin
• Disable all plugins
• Delete everything except wp-config.php and wp-content/ in your wordpress directory
• Visit http://yourblog/wp-admin/upgrade.php
• Follow the instructions

Database upgrade completed without any difficulties and after the upgrade we started to turn on our plugins. We turned on all of the plugins that we use except the WP-SuperCache and Ozh’ Admin Drop Down Menu. Heavily modified theme that we use currently on our website didn’t work as it was supposed to, but we didn’t expect it to actually work. We switched to the new default theme which is supposed to demonstrate few of the new Theme API features.

New default theme, Twenty Ten, is simple and comes with few interesting features. First we noticed that Zemanta plugin didn’t render floating descriptions on images correctly, but it isn’t clear if this is plugins fault or new theme breaks something.

Broken description

Other than that we did not encounter any other problems with rendering. Default theme is fast and light and it comes with the built in option to change header image of your blog. Support for threaded comments is also there.

Header Selection

New theme is also packed with placeholders for widgets and because sidebars are so 2009, they are now called widget areas. Which can cause some confusion since you must guess where each area is located.

New widget areas

Theme changer, editor and installer got some love and tabbed interface will make theme installing and switching a little easier. One of the new features is also the new editor-style.css. This style is applied to the built in editor and now editor in visual mode can display what really gets rendered on your screen². The whole admin interface and dashboard were changed a little bit, but not as much as you would expect in a major release. We were hoping for more color schemes, unfortunately we are still stuck with blue and gray.

Another important feature in WordPress 3.0 will be menus. Menus give you the ability to create customized menus for your blog. With beta1 each menu item can contain existing pages, custom links and existing categories. This can, and we hope it will, change in the next beta. We really did miss an option to add a label item to the menu and we managed to kill our test blog by experimenting with the various menus. Right now you will have to create a new dummy custom link if you want group options in sub menus.

Current Menu Editor

Menus will come in handy to those who want to organize their menu based structure on the front page. Now you can drag and drop and create sub menus easily. On the Twenty Ten theme the above menu will look like this:

Rendered Menus

Even in beta1 menus look promising and creating a little more complicated structure is not that difficult compared to previous WordPress versions.

More advanced writers will be happy about ability to add custom post types. Default theme does not have any support for that, but theme developers will be able to add various post types with many different parameters. Custom posts are described at wpengineer.com.

Another big thing in 3.0 release is merge of WordPress and WordPress MU. WordPress MU was used for large sites that were providing WordPress as a service for many, many users. If you host only one blog for yourself then nothing will change for you. If you have multiple users with separate installations, then things will be a bit simpler from now on.

In the end we came to the thing called Canonical Plug-ins. There is this movement that is trying to unify plugin developers and create more dedicated community so that plugins don’t die when a single developer, who was developing it, leaves to chase other things in life. We are keeping our fingers crossed. Really!

All in all WordPress 3.0 looks promising so far. Not too many noticeable bugs and we managed to kill our blog only once when we were playing with the menus. Promised changes and some more work on this feature will most likely deal with these issues. Smooth and steady sailing into the beta2 and then final release that you can jump on.