Fruitbowl - Fresh Ideas from Hawke's Bay

The folks over at WordPress have released the much anticipated WordPress 3.0 to the collective joy of web developers worldwide.

Incase you weren't already aware we are complete WordPress evangelists. We don't just build WordPress, we live and breathe it. So given the opportunity to take 3.0 for a test drive we were chomping at the bit. And we can tell you now that it delivers.

So what's new?

There's a whole new raft of "out of the box" features that WordPress 3.0 provides for users and developers alike. Here's what really excites us:

• Custom content types - previously limited to posts for a blog or pages for the rest of the site, WordPress steps up into the realm of true CMS by allowing the creation of any post type imaginable. Product catalog, anyone? Real Estate listings? Employee list?
• Custom Taxonomies - for those familiar with WordPress you'll know about categories and tags - custom taxonomies allow us to create limitless ways to include meta data about your content.
• Integrated Mutli-user - Need multiple blogs? Previously a separate project, WordPress now comes with WPMU (WordPress Multi-User) completely integrated. With the addition of the BuddyPress plugin it's now even possible to develop your own social network.
• Custom menus - we can now add almost any type of content to a single navigation menu.  Pages, posts, categories, tags or any custom content types or taxonomies - even links to external sites.

If you're anything like me, reading about it isn't really learning about it. So here's the official WordPress tutorial:

I'm so glad you're excited about it, Mogul, but...

...what does it all mean? Well, from our point of view it feels that the somewhat rigid structure of the already brilliant WordPress has just taken a turn for the better, sleeker and more flexible. This means we can now develop an even more fluid and extensible site that better suits the end-user requirements. There's also a number of improved backend processes that make managing the site even easier than before.

How we're using it

We've upgraded a number of sites to WordPress 3.0 already (including Fruitbowl!) and we've even built and launched two sites from the ground up using WordPress 3.0 as a base.  Before we really got our teeth sunk into a feature packed 3.0 site though we wanted to make sure that this new version still catered to the basic needs of our clients. And it does. Amazingly well, as always.  Right now we've got a number of great 3.0 sites in the pipeline that use some of these new features, so watch this space!

WordPress has truly matured from simple blogging tool to serious player in the Content Management System game.

So what are your thoughts?  How do you think we could use some of these new tools to improve your user experience?