I grabbed a copy of the WordPress 3.0 Beta and downloaded it for my own perusing. Here are some general observations that I think are pretty cool.
1. One of the best things happens when you initial install WordPress 3.0. When you are filling out your setup information, it asks you for the admin username and password. Rather than forcing it to be ‘admin’ and then get a random password that you are forced to change later anyway, you can set the username and the password you want. This is pretty slick, especially if you develop WordPress sites and are installing new versions daily.
2. In the add new/edit post screen, you can now see the comments that are associated to that post. This is a pretty cool feature. I can see this being useful if you need to edit a post and include a change that someone has made in the comments. Rather than going back and forth, you can just scroll down and see your comments.
3. In WordPress 2.9, the post thumbnail feature was released, allowing you to easily insert thumbnails for posts and pages. In WordPress 3.0 (beta), it has been renamed to “Featured Image” which I think is a more fitting name for what it does in most themes.
4. The ability to create menus is added in WP 3.0, but there is a notice saying that the feature is still under development so I’m not going to bother testing it. It looks like it has a ton of potential though.
5. Widgets/Sidebar – Rather than having “sidebars” with widgets in them, it appears you can have multiple widget areas. This is nothing new, but it seems like the thought of a sidebar is fading, and in the future you will just have widget areas.
6. Export – The export feature has been updated. In previous versions you were only able to restrict all or one of the authors to the export, and that was the only option. Now you can filter by date, author, category, content and status. This could be very helpful when exporting information.
Hopefully when I have a little more time I will dig into the code and see what is there. Overall, from my short observations and from what I have read, WordPress 3.0 is going to packed with features. I am also excited to see how it works hand in hand with BuddyPress.
The new menu system looks awesome and is in fact based on the woonav from woothemes. What it ends up meaning is that custom menus with a combination of pages and category links are now easily created and managed.
Loving the new theme and customisation features as well, should all add up to a better looking internet which is good for all of us – kubrick was becomming an eyesore!
I also grabbed a copy for myself, and was totally digging on the ability to enter your own name and password from the get go. No longer will I have to jump into the DB to change the administrator login name.
One thing I noticed, and it may have just been me, was that I didn’t get the config file setup page. I had to manually edit my config file to get WP to run initially. DB setup was fine though.
But yeah, 3.0 looks to have some very nice features, and custom post types is one of them (surprised you didn’t mention it here), although it’s not part of the admin, you have to edit them in your functions.php file. See http://kovshenin.com/archives/custom-post-types-in-wordpress-3-0/ for more info.