In the movies when you watch sequals, the 'part 3' typically outright stinks. They become quite gratuitous offerings to take advantage of an existing fan base to gain mass quantities of revenue for the movie industry. Examples: Rocky III, Rambo III, Lethan Weapon III, Return of the Jedi, Police Accademy 3 and cubed. You get the idea. Thank goodness the world of web applications do not follow that same marketing druel. Wordpress is about to release the third version of their blog framework. The words brilliant, amanzing, awesome, blogolicious come to mind.
Some of the best features being added are allowing WP to be more than just a simple blog and really compete with Content Management Frameworks like Drupal and Joomla. Some exampless are:
- Merging of Wordpress and Wordpress MU (Multiple User) - This allows you to network your blogs together through a single dashboard.
- Custom Post Types - This allows you to customize a page layout type. Similar to Joomla's page types, you can set custom defined pages to have say additional pages for photos, a newspaper style layout, etc. It puts more controls to the owner for additional content and control how that will get displayed.
- Menu Management - I've never understood why other systems makes this complicated and WP gets it. WP has very much simplified building menus with a slick drag and drop interface.
- Custom Taxonomies - Add customized ways to group info on your site further than just tags and categories. Custom taxonomies allow you to add another level into that. The best example on the web I could fine was Justin Tadlock's blog in an article called, "Using custom taxonimies to create a movie database." Here he describes how using these taxonimies in a WP 2.8 blog you can use taxonimies to group data by genre, director, actor, etc.
- Shortlinks with your own domain - This is specifically useful for microblogging your content on sites like Twitter. Where before you might use a service tinyurl to condense the size of your link so you can stay under that 150 charachter limit on your tweet. You post might look like this http://tinurl.com/*&(YGHGE now you can use your own domain to keep your brand. An exmple might be http://topsweb.com/?post=255. This is one of those features that you have to ask once you see it, "Why has this not always been around?" Simple but brilliant.
Wordpress had done a great job with this version and we will be offering it in the next month at our Web Services Center. For those who enjoy the simplicity offered by Wordpress blogs but want a bit more power of a CMS such as Joomla, then WordPress 3.0 is the best solution for you.