With WordPress 3 rumored to be out any day now, we thought you would like a sneak peak of what some of the changes are.
Twenty Ten
To start, we finally have a new default theme. Its called Twenty Ten and is a two column layout with support for custom background and header images, a widgetized sidebar, and a horizontal drop down menu. Matt Thomas says this: “Our goal with Twenty Ten was to create something stylish, customizable, simple, and most of all,readable. Since every new WordPress user will be seeing Twenty Ten, we wanted to design an example of what a WordPress theme can do.”
Custom Menus
We’ve been playing with these a bit over here at Blueprint Design Studio and let me tell you, this is one of the most useful features WordPress 3 has to offer theme developers. This will allow you to register any number of menus and display them in your themes template files using a simple function call. For the user this simply means you’ll get a new page with some tools on it to help you add, delete, and arrange. 
Custom Post Types & Taxonomies
This is my personal favorite of the mix thus far as it enables developers to easily create a more robust CMS, meeting criteria we may not have been able to do before. Custom taxonomies were brought into WordPress with release 2.8 and had some improvements made with the release of 2.9 but WordPress 3 improves this greatly by including hierarchical (category-style) taxonomies, and giving users a custom UI for pages as well as for posts.
Multiple Sites With Single WordPress Install
Another great update is the merging of Wordpress MU into the standalone. If you don’t already know what that means, WordPress MU makes it possible for those with a website to host their own blogging community, as well as control and moderate all the blogs from a single dashboard. This is a good thing because your install can work with sub-domains or sub-directories. The multisite feature in is disabled by default so you will need to enable it.
To do this navigate to Tools > Network under WordPress admin menu and specify Network settings. Create “blogs.dir” in wp-content folder and add the following line in your wp-config.php file:
define(‘WP_ALLOW_MULTISITE’, true);
You may also need to modify your .htaccess file.
When your done with that, you will see a new menu section called “Super Admin”. This will allow adding and managing of the additional sites in your network with your install now being the ‘controller’.
In Conclusion
Hopefully we’ll be able to see the official release sooner than later. As always, for more information on this and other WordPress related news, consult the Codex.
