4 June 2010
WordPress 3.0 for Web Designers
Editors Note: In his first article for Think Vitamin Richard Shepherd looks at what’s new in the upcoming 3.0 release of WordPress and quizzes a number of web designers on their thoughts on the new features.
According to founder Matt Mullenweg, WordPress now runs an estimated 8.5% of all sites on the internet. This is a staggering amount – almost one in every ten sites is sitting on what was once just ‘blogging software’.
Put another way, there are 20 million eager WordPressers looking forward to the long awaited upgrade from 2.9.2 to WordPress 3.0.
The first release candidate is now available and most of the new features are well-known and have been described in detail. Others, like custom post types, are leaving some users scratching their heads. But what does the new version of WordPress mean for the millions of web designers that use it every day?
A CMS by any Other Name
“Version 3 is absolutely a step forward for designers”, argues Chris Coyier from CSSTricks”
“For one thing, I think it will finally squelch the ‘WordPress is a blogging platform, not a CMS’ argument. With custom post types becoming a core feature, it is straight up CMS territory.”
We’ll come back to custom post types later, but the point that Chris makes about WordPress becoming a true Content Management System (CMS) has lots of support.
Elliot Jay Stocks is a well-known designer who uses WordPress, and he’s also excited about this development towards a true CMS:
“It’s definitely a step forward. It’s moving further and further away from its roots as a blogging engine and incorporating powerful tools that make it a viable CMS.”
Jeff Starr, who co-wrote ‘Digging into WordPress’, believes that:
“WordPress 3 is custom everything, and it’s awesome. These features provide greater control and flexibility in terms of content organisation, presentation, and management. Custom content types take us beyond the days of posts and pages. Custom taxonomies take us beyond tags and categories.”
Adii Pienaar from WooThemes agrees:
“I’m very excited about custom post types as this makes WordPress even more of a fully-fledged CMS”
So let’s take a look at some of these features in more depth, and just how they will affect web professionals designing sites for the WordPress platform.
Custom Post Types – Simpler than it Sounds
Perhaps the feature that causes the most confusion, or at least the most questions, is custom post types. At its heart it’s a relatively simple concept – instead of just posts and pages you can now specify your own type of entry.
Admin screen for a custom post type of “Video”
Chris from CSSTricks explains the concept well:
“Think of how Tumblr works – how you can publish photos, quotes, links and whatever else. You could create those same types now with WordPress, and build themes to support and have special styles for them. This is fantastic stuff for building custom sites!”
Fantastic stuff indeed, and it’s interesting to hear Chris mention Tumblr. WordPress’s nimbler, younger cousin continues to grow at a phenomenal rate and has many fans out there. Indeed, some designers have ditched WordPress altogether for Tumblr.
Others, like Corbus Bester, have designed amazing WordPress sites that look and feel like Tumblogs. Perhaps there is some mileage in this fusion of styles; it’s certainly now possible – and considerably easier – with custom post types.
Chris Spooner from SpoonGraphics also sees the benefit this new feature will bring:
“As someone who uses WordPress for almost every website I build, I’d say it would be really useful to be able to create a new entry for a particular section of a website that’s different to the usual post and page layouts. A new portfolio entry springs to mind as a good use of this feature.”
The Community Gives Back
One of the other highly publicised additions, thanks in no small part to the goodwill and marketing genius of those WooThemes folk, is the new Navigation System.
Admin screen for the new menu system
It is, in short, a master-stoke. It also blurs the line between the open-source platform and its profit-making community. Adii Pienaar explains:
“I’m happy to be a bit biased, but the new menu system that WooThemes contributed is long overdue and a massive benefit to every single WordPress user, In essence, this is such a basic feature of any CMS, but due to it being a benefit to all WordPress users I think this is a significant new addition” he adds.
Chris Coyier believes:
“The menu building tools are going to be huge for designers as well, and unquestioningly a step forward. Building dynamic menus in the past has involved using WordPress functions in the theme code itself with a bunch of parameters. Nerdy stuff, and not for the average site owner or even for many designers.”
WooThemes designer Magnus Jepson agrees:
“The navigation system will let designers concentrate on setting up the menu instead of hard coding it.”
So how does it work? Chris explains:
“The new menu builder puts a GUI on [menu building], putting menu control in the admin where it should be and where anybody can intuitively control it.”
Other Features
Of the myriad other features on offer with version 3.0, the more noteworthy include:
- The long awaited integration of WordPress MU with the core WordPress code, a project that has taken the WordPress team over a year;
- The new default theme TwentyTen, and the promise of a new theme every year;
- New author templates, allowing the easier customisation of pages for individual authors; and
- A new installation system, ditching the known security issue that is the ubiquitous ‘admin’ user.
The new default theme “TwentyTen” home page
WordPress 3 for Designers
So will these new features make a difference for designers? Adii argues:
“Not necessarily for designers, I think the new features are probably more geared to end-users, like the menu system, or developers, for example custom post types.”
He has a point. The level of comfort and experience you have with PHP really does affect how much you can squeeze from the WordPress system; HTML and CSS are simply not enough. Elliot touches on this:
“I hope it becomes easier to work with template files. Less PHP wizardry required and more functionality built in from the start.”
Chris Spooner thinks that others will benefit from the upgrade:
“I see the upgrades more suited to the everyday end user. The extra customisation options will also allow the non-tech user to add their own touch to their blog.”
Others, like Jeff Starr, believe that WordPress 3 will bring benefits to designers as well:
“[It is] definitely a step forward. A huge step. In addition to better content management, its integration of WPMU makes it that much easier to create entire networks of sites with a single installation. WordPress 3 also features bulk updates for plug-ins and themes, saving users even more time.”
And it’s that hacking that keeps WordPress, even version 3.0, out of the reach of anyone without a basic grounding in PHP (and, arguably, jQuery). Elliot argues:
“It still doesn’t look as powerful as Expression Engine, But for ease-of-setup and ease-of-use, WordPress remains my favourite CMS. My only beef with WordPress is that it can take a lot of hacking to get what you want, and I’m hoping that WordPress 3 will solve this problem.”
The future for WordPress
So just what does the future hold for WordPress? Is it too early to speculate what we’ll see in WordPress 4?
“I’d actually vote for it not to develop too much,” said Adii from WooThemes. “WordPress is great because it has never been the most complex or complicated system to use. I am however in favour of adding functionality that will make WordPress a more complete CMS, even if that means having different ‘flavours’ of the platform i.e. blogging vs. CMS.”
Perhaps WordPress.com will remain as the hosted solution for casual bloggers, and a ‘WPLite’ version will also become available.
We then might see an offshoot, the more powerful CMS version, which caters for the needs of its considerable and growing user-base of web designers looking for a back-end system.
It makes sense, and it could see an opportunity for Automattic to further monetise part of its software-as-service stable. But who exactly would profit? And who would pay?
When asked about the future or WordPress, Jeff focuses on usability for designers:
“Make it fast, make it secure, and make it easy on the server. Go for lean and mean, and deprecate the fluff that nobody uses.”
This sentiment is echoed by Magnus:
“I hope that WordPress will develop to be faster and more secure than it is today, and also that it adopts the most widely used functions into the core for all to use. Maybe wishful thinking to have both new functions and faster system, but everything is possible.”
Chris Coyier also offers some thoughts about the future:
“As far as the software itself, I hope it continues to have a big community and have a good, smart, quick core team. There are no particular ‘features’ that I’m pining for anymore, mostly just a wish that the team keeps my WordPress nice and secure as we move forward.”
There’s a nice turn of phrase here from Chris, “My WordPress”. The wonderful thing about WordPress is that it’s us, the users, the designers and the developers that help create its ultimate direction. And it’s our creative and unique implementations of this powerful system that will guide its future development.
Want More on WordPress 3.0?
Over the coming weeks we will be taking a more code based look at some of the new features in WordPress 3.0. Watch out for our first article which will focus on “Custom Posts” in the next few weeks.
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Rachel
# June 4, 2010 - 11:33 am
Exciting stuff – really looking forward to trying WP3 out. Thanks for the great overview :)
Josh
# June 4, 2010 - 12:57 pm
Although many may argue against it due to performance reasons, I’d like to see a templating language that is easier to understand than PHP. I’m not saying PHP is difficult, but, for designers not versed in any programming language, it would be nice to use a templating language instead of the PHP tags. Think of something along the lines of ExpressionEngine or Textpattern.
Richard Shepherd
# June 4, 2010 - 1:28 pm
Thanks Rachel. We’ll be posting some tutorials on the new WP3 features soon!
Ryan Carson
# June 4, 2010 - 2:32 pm
Great article bud!
Richard Shepherd
# June 4, 2010 - 2:56 pm
Thanks Ryan! Hopefully the first of many ;) Next up, Custom Post Types…
baca
# June 4, 2010 - 1:28 pm
Really exciting :) I just installed WP3 to try it on !
Bruno
# June 4, 2010 - 1:42 pm
I’ve been using 2.9.2 as a CMS already. It is not only works great, it is much easier to use.
Ken Jones
# June 4, 2010 - 2:19 pm
Custom posts looks like an absolute godsend. The ability to define custom templates for different authors is going to be incredibly useful as well.
Now all I need is a bestest bud who’ll help me to get my head around all this new grooviness ;-)
Jane Wells
# June 4, 2010 - 2:31 pm
Hi there. Thanks for the great review! I’d like to clarify one thing in regard to this comment in the article: “You could create those same types [photos, quotes, links and whatever else] now with WordPress, and build themes to support and have special styles for them.”
Custom post types aren’t really meant for that use; they just got named poorly because they live in the Posts table in the database. Think of them more like custom objects/content types. “Custom post types” are great for things that are more or less catalogued: products (in an e-commerce site), listings for a real estate site, etc. For regular content creation as described in the quote, you can already do what that person is suggesting by using custom taxonomies and/or stylesheets to make post templates (the P2 theme does this).
Jane Wells
# June 4, 2010 - 5:51 pm
Oh, also, we didn’t start he merge with MU until after 2.9 was released, so it didn’t take a year. We announced the decision to merge a year in advance so that developers of plugins and themes would have plenty of time to get used to the change, but the actual merge didn’t start until early 2010.
Richard Shepherd
# June 10, 2010 - 7:09 am
Thanks for the clarification, Jane! We’re posting a tutorial on Custom Post Types soon so hopefully that’ll clear things up. The real estate example seems to be one people ‘get’ so maybe I’ll focus on that :)
PixelCellar
# June 4, 2010 - 2:37 pm
Great round-up on some of the new cool things that are officially coming in WordPress 3. Lots of really useful and time saving tweaks in there to help designers concentrate on what they do best and allow developers to take things to a whole new level.
Will be interesting to see some of the themes that come out when WordPress 3 hits and how extensively they support the new functionality available to them.
I myself have only had a bit of a look at WordPress 3; looks like I better get my hands dirty and have a more in depth look prior to it’s official launch.
Nice article Richard, keep them coming!!
Scott
# June 4, 2010 - 2:41 pm
Fantastic article and nice summary. I’ve been struggling with WordPress for 6 months, trying to build sites for clients and get them to do what seem like pretty straightforward things. I ranted about my frustrations a bit in the WP forums, and saw a response along the lines of “WP is good at what it was intended to do”. That’s pretty vague, although I can only believe that the ‘intention’ was “make blogging easy for the blogger”. It shocked me that WP 2.9.2 was almost embarrassingly missing some very basic functionality, required by both designers/developers and those responsible for maintaining WP-based sites.
So it was very refreshing to see this quote from Elliot Jay Stocks: “My only beef with WordPress is that it can take a lot of hacking to get what you want, and I’m hoping that WordPress 3 will solve this problem.” Yup. 80% of my time spent on building WP sites is spent on hacking. That’s fine for a product in the alpha, beta, or even “version 0.9″ range. But for something approaching version 3 to be missing such vital stuff and requiring “hacking to get what you want” is nothing to be proud of.
I am just about to bail out on developing any future sites in WP. I can be much more productive, fast, and profitable using other tools. I’m willing to take a fresh look at version 3, but it is really going to have to blow me away for me to “come home to WP”.
I appreciate the article, and the comments from industry heavyweights. I’m pleased that my sense of WP’s weaknesses is not just in my head but that others see them, too, and are hopeful that version 3 will make them fading memories of frustration.
Rob Layfield
# June 4, 2010 - 2:42 pm
Good article, keeps right to the point. WordPress 3 is a major evolution; the custom post types coupled with the “wordpress network” (WPMU) is a double whammy for those who criticise WordPress for being too basic.
Having worked with WP3 I really have no qualms about upgrading all our WP sites to it. Simply put it’s a considerable improvement upon the existing WordPress platform.
RG
# June 4, 2010 - 2:46 pm
Excellent article, have been looking forward to 3.0 especially to the MU and templates
Chris Wallace
# June 4, 2010 - 3:05 pm
One thing I’d like to see is putting more dependence on configuration options managed by themes via add_theme_support().
This is one thing Movable Type does very well. Each theme uses a configuration file to set up what you can touch and what you can’t touch within the backend. This is excellent for developers building sites for businesses that can’t be trusted to touch advanced features (or where certain features just aren’t necessary).
That’s where I think WordPress can allow advanced functionality yet give theme developers control over whether those features are enabled and available for users.
Pixil.info
# June 4, 2010 - 3:45 pm
Great run down of everyones thoughts! Awesome post :)
Chris Creed
# June 4, 2010 - 4:07 pm
Thanks for the overview Richard – particulary agree with the point Jeff makes about keeping it lean and fast going forward. One thing I would like to see in the near future is a better iPhone app – hopefully something will be released soon.
Nick
# June 4, 2010 - 5:47 pm
You may want to update your article. RC2 is now out: http://wordpress.org/wordpress-3.0-RC2.zip
Drew
# June 4, 2010 - 7:18 pm
Really looking forward to more about WP 3. The custom post type / custom taxonomy functionality seems really cool, but then I get lost with how to tie in classic functions like get_category() when there aren’t categories per se?
Of course I should say I haven’t tried it out yet, but that’s where my mind kind of goes fuzzy
ali
# June 4, 2010 - 11:59 pm
after reading this of course l did try version 3 and works nice, cant wait to ubgrade my blog now.
Ecenica
# June 5, 2010 - 3:37 pm
Awesome article. The new WordPress 3.0 Menu features look great, and is a much needed feature. As avid WPMU users we’re also real keen to see how well the two editions merge.
Doug Barned
# June 5, 2010 - 9:00 pm
Great read, thanks!
Very much looking forward to the post on custom post types that you’ve got in the works.
Husien Adel
# June 5, 2010 - 10:52 pm
great start and open my appetite for new version for wp :D , wish to be easy to customize and more fast & secure . thanks Rich
waiting your coming article about Wp 3.0 ;)
warren
# June 5, 2010 - 11:48 pm
Wordpress still has a long way to go in becoming a true cms. Currently Drupal is the way to go for custom websites with modules built for just about everything.
Jesse Kade
# June 6, 2010 - 11:34 am
Nice…I’m hecka stocked on the new WordPress…it’s gunna be gangster.
Claudia
# June 6, 2010 - 12:43 pm
Hope this new version could be a more “HTML free”, I mean in latest version my HTML is often bad output even with all my love =)
Let’s see!
Anyway, a great article, thak you!
Pontus Ekman
# June 6, 2010 - 7:29 pm
I’m really looking forward to the final release of WordPress 3.0. However, after reading this article I decided to check out the Release Candidate. Time to experiment!
gabe nowak
# June 7, 2010 - 2:05 am
great article – looking forward to taking WordPress 3.0 for a spin!
ThemeWarrior
# June 7, 2010 - 11:18 am
Can’t wait for WordPress 3.0 stable version! I’m really interested in the new Custom Post Type feature
Amber Weinberg
# June 9, 2010 - 8:11 pm
I think the templating system for devs who don’t know PHP is easy enough already. I use WordPress for 99% of my sites, most of which don’t even have a blog – it’s a great CMS and very easy to customize. What I need it to do that I don’t know how to do is easily remedied by one quick Google search. There’s no other community like that.
Richard Shepherd
# June 10, 2010 - 7:13 am
For an interesting look at what it takes to design for the WordPress user interface, check out John O’Nolans great article “Designing for Over Twenty Million Users: WordPress 3.0″
http://www.webdesignerdepot.com/2010/05/designing-for-over-twenty-million-users-wordpress-3-0/
John’s an active (and vocal!) member of the WP community and we’re hoping to talk to him more in future articles.
memo
# June 13, 2010 - 11:28 am
I can’t wait to update my wordpress to 3.0!