Working with WordPress 3.0
I’ve been working with the latest development snapshot of WordPress 3.0 (Currently 3.0-beta2-14640). It’s pretty damn nifty. I’ve really enjoyed what I’ve seen so far. I’ve been able to create secondary and utility navigation’s using the new Menu’s under the Appearance section. I’ve also a huge fan of the ability to create new post types. This is basically custom content types for WordPress.
I’ve been able to create a custom page for putting in management bio’s for a small site I’m building. Using the feature image and a custom meta box for the title and name, I’ve got a fully customizable page for just the attorney’s. You can take this a few steps further by defining out a custom page to display those pages by themselves and then I also created a template page that will format and display the listing of them they way I want. Pulling out the feature image, their name and title.
Another great use of this is for callouts. On the current project I am working on, we are listing out 3 callouts on the main page. In the past I’ve seen this pull in content from articles, or hard-coded into the template. I’ve now been able, to use the register post type to be able to create callouts. It will grab the first three and throw them into the div’s I have defined in the template. Using the feature Image and a meta box field for the link I can now put in text or an image for the callouts and have it link to any page in the CMS.
I look forward to exploring WordPress as time goes, I think it might finally become the standard CMS for small sites.
