Themes for WordPress 2.5 and Web 3.0 Design and Functionality

WordPress 2.5, the much anticipated latest release from the team at Automattic officially hit the streets on March 29^th complete with a radical overhaul of the WordPress “corporate” site as well.

Here are some of the cool features on the “inside” that make life a little easier, or at least more convenient.

1. The dashboard has been “widgetized” enabling you to customize what you see. Of course there is the invaluable WordPress News, a feature displaying information about your posts, links, popular plugins and integrates with WordPress stats so you can easily see your traffic, latest visitors, etc. This upgrade takes a little getting used to if you’re a hardcore WP user, but even after a few hours you’ll fall in love with the Web 3.0 design and functionality.

2. Enhanced Search – WordPress 2.5 used to search only posts, it now searches pages as well which enhances search engine optimization and user friendliness by providing information to your visitors on your “static” content, not just your posts.

3. Concurrent Editing – if you’re running a multi-author blog – for example a company site with several “administrators” who add/edit content, WordPress 2.5 “locks” the post or page so that the “2^nd person” can’t save edits until the “1^st person” is done – and let’s you know that someone else is working on it. This is a handy addition, and reduces the “dude, I just changed that” factor!

4. Tag Management ­ - no more widgets, it’s built into WordPress 2.5.

5. WordPress Plug-in Upgrades – instead of the old, delete, replace method WordPress 2.5 features what they term “a few clicks upgrade” – depending upon the plugin developer, this is a very cool feature. However, it depends upon your host as to whether it will work – should be good for most. It might be a good idea to write down how you did any custom configuration on your plugin before upgrading.

Here’s a list of WordPress Plug-Ins that have been updated for WordPress 2.5.

Now here’s the two main WordPress Theme and design features. Here’s a list of WordPress 2.5 Compatible Themes.

1. TinyMCE 3.0 – for anyone who has used previous versions of TinyMCE as their visual editor for WordPress you might have had the occasion when stuff just didn’t come out the way you put it in. TinyMCE 3.0 is supposed to have that fixed. This is a boon for those WordPress users that don’t really want to do creepy coding to make double spaces work and the like. And great for WordPress Theme Designers who go nuts “fixing” little problems for clients/end users who “want it to look like Microsoft Word”!

2. Built-in Galleries – this is wicked cool. If you use the multi-image upload to load up a whole series of photos, WordPress 2.5 has a new shortcut that allows you to add a WordPress Gallery by just putting in [ gallery] without the space in your post. The shortcut code in WordPress 2.5 will display all of your thumbnails and captions with a link to a page where visitors and readers can comment on the image. You can easily set up multiple galleries for use with different topics, categories, posts, etc.

There are some other cool options like how many columns and the size of the thumbnail for example that you can simply use. The Codex has all the info you need.

So far we’ve had a good experience with WordPress 2.5 and this release is a real testament to the development team, the leadership and the community as a whole. It just keeps getting better!

If you haven’t tried it out yet, it’s most certainly worth every second you spend, and since it’s open source, the price is right, the experience is invaluable, and the hits just keep on coming!

Christopher Conlan is Managing Director of Kaboodle Ventures and has been working with WordPress for two and a half years. Visit his blog at www.web30technology.com for more information, if you need help with a WordPress blog, search engine optimization, e-marketing strategy, or want to subscribe to his newsletter.