WordPress 3.0 recently came out and offers quite a bit of cool new features. These features continue to make the platform go beyond just blogging. Over the past few years it has become a popular choice for many small and medium sized businesses to power their corporate websites. I’ve picked a few new features that make me giddy and I’ll discuss how they can be used for your website.
1. Custom Post Types
This has to be the best added feature in this release. Up to this point WordPress has had only two types of content, Pages and Posts. This is great if you have a basic website that only has pages and news or blog entries. But what if you had something else on your site, like a portfolio or catalog of products? In order to list them you had to get creative with how you made use of posts and categories to make these pseudo ’content types’ .
Now we have the ability to define new content types and the fields associated to them. This makes it easy for non-technical users to add new content by simply filling out a form with all the required data for the type of content.
Another great feature to accompany this is that each content type can have their own taxonomy. After all, what good is custom content if you cannot properly tag and organize it?
2. Advanced Menus
Ok, so maybe this is the best new feature. It’s just as good as custom posts. In the past Pages and Posts were kept completely separate so you couldn’t have an easily managed menu that contained a mix of both Pages and Posts. Many themes had two menus, one for each. I guess I should clarify, this new version still handles them separately, however, they have added a new menu feature that allows you to create customized menus of any item you want. No more custom HTML and complicated PHP if statements in order to have the menu you want.
3. Custom Admin Account
In prior versions the system would automatically create a user with the username ‘admin’. One of the first things I would do would be to create a new admin user account and delete the ‘admin’ user. Removing this user helps with security. It’s a pretty safe bet that any given WordPress site has a user named ‘admin’. So if hackers wanted in your website they would point an automated script at you login using ‘admin’ and cycle through a list of passwords. Chances are, they’d eventually get in after trying enough passwords.
The safest thing was to delete the user all together. Now there is no additional step… just don’t use ‘admin’ when your own username. 
