With a new default theme and multi-user functionality

Apr 6, 2010 07:58 GMT  ·  By

Self-reliant bloggers everywhere should be getting pretty excited as WordPress 3.0 is coming very, very soon. For now, they can play with WordPress 3.0 Beta 1, released last week, which comes with most of the new and updated features slated for the big release, but it still has some rough edges in a few areas. The highlights include a new default theme, the WordPress MU (multi-user) merger and a new custom menu system that isn't quite finished yet.

"Beta testers, this is your moment: the WordPress 3.0 Beta 1 has arrived! This is an early beta. This means there are a few things we’re still finishing," Jane Wells, the UX lead at Automattic, the company behind the WordPress blogging software and the WordPress.com platform, said.

"We wanted to get people testing it this weekend, so we’re releasing it now rather than waiting another week until everything is finalized and polished. There’s a ton of stuff going on in 3.0, so this time we’re giving you a list of things to check out, so that we can make sure people are testing all the things that need it," she explained.

The big, new feature in WordPress 3.0, at least for some, is the merger between the WordPress MU fork and WordPress 'vanilla,' which brings multi-user functionality. This will allow users to create several different blogs based on the same install. For now, the feature isn't as easy to try out as others in WordPress and requires a few changes and tweaks under the hood.

A great thing about WordPress, especially when you're hosting your own blog, is the freedom it gives you to create a completely unique one. There are thousands of themes to choose from out there and you can make your own or customize an existing one, the possibilities are virtually endless. Yet, even with all this choice, the default theme in WordPress is very important.

The new default theme in WordPress 3.0, dubbed Twenty Ten, keeps the design simple without becoming minimalistic. It should be all things to everybody, so the designers didn't go out of their way to impress with the new theme, it's all about functionality. Twenty Ten comes with a customizable background and header and could serve as a solid base for users wanting to hone their CSS/WordPress theming skills.

Another interesting, new feature in WordPress 3.0 Beta 1 is the Custom Post Type functionality. This will allow users to set up a post template of sorts for common post types like videos, podcasts, quotes, and so on. The feature is fully baked and the developers are encouraging testers to start hacking away at it to see how it holds up.

Some features in WordPress 3.0 Beta 1 are not quite beta material at this point, for example the custom menu system, in Appearance > Menus, won't be reaching a final state until Beta 2 is released, but the developers wanted the first beta out the door to test out everything else. Some small UI tweaks are also still in the works.

WordPress 3.0 Beta 1 is available for download here on Softpedia.