Blog Azeroth

A new version of WordPress is slated for release late this month or early next month. The new version features a lot of usability and security improvements and a lot of added functionality. You can download a beta of 3.0 here. (I would not recommend using this version on your live site--only on a locally hosted version for testing purposes--as they've already stated there are a lot of bugs still to be worked out, which is why the release has been delayed.)

New Features:

New Installation Process
They've updated the process by which you install WordPress. With 3.0, users will be able to specify their own username and password when installing WordPress, which constitutes a major security fix (since "admin" will no longer be the default username).

New Default Theme
Say goodbye to that hideously ugly blue Kubrik theme that used to come packaged with every WordPress install. The new 2010 theme will be the default theme for WordPress installs this year, and they have plans to release new default themes each year (which is why this new theme was named after this year).

The new default theme will allow a lot of customizability right out of the box. It comes packaged with a variety of default header images, and the option for users to upload and use their own header images right from the Dashboard. The same is true of background images: you'll be able to choose from some defaults provided, or upload your own.

This new theme also has drop-down menu functionality built in.

New Link Shortener
On Edit Post pages, they've added a "Shortlink" button which will automatically generate shortened links for use on social media services like Twitter.

New Menu Management System
This feature will allow users more control over how the menu of their site is constructed and displayed. You can create multiple menus from a single interface in the Dashboard, and specify the contents of each menu (similar in nature to how widgets currently behave).

Author Template Support
If you have multiple authors publishing to your site, each will be given their own IDs (similar to categories and pages). This feature can be used to design unique looks for specific author pages to help differentiate them from other parts of the site.

Multi-Site Functionality
WordPress is merging with WordPressMU (WordPress Multi-User) which allowed users to manage multiple sites with a single installation. In short, this change simply means that WordPressMU will become defunct, and you'll be able to manage multiple sites under a single installation of WordPress by default. (This will be of particular interest to users who enjoy focusing on multiple aspects of the game but find managing multiple sites difficult--you'll be able to run multiple sites with one install now, all from the same Dashboard.)

For a full run-down of the new features in WordPress 3.0, check out the official documentation.

The new theme looks very fancy indeed - it was actually something like that which I was looking for before I found Intrepidy (my current theme). It looks very slick, none the less.

What I'm most excited about is the prospect of managing two blogs in one. Ive wanted to add a personal blog for quite a while, but couldn't be bothered to have it off-site, and it seemed too much of a hassle to find a workaround. I suppose that with the new system, I can have Qieth's Quips and then qieths-quips.com/personal to be a whole different blog - right? Pretty awesome.

The link shortener is pretty handy, but I use bit.ly anyways most of the time. If they really wanted to make me glee like a little girl, they would allow automatic pushes to Twitter and Facebook, sending something like:

New on Qieth's Quips: *title of blog* - *link to blog* #moonkin #druid #wow

Or whatever. The words in the stars (*) would just be replaced with whats relevant for that blog.

After reading the more detailed version of this, I am slightly confused about this whole Multi Blog thing. See, I've wanted to have a personal blog on my site for a long time, but I'm not sure this is giving me what I want.

What I want is to have a second blog - personal.qieths-quips.com or qieths-quips.com/personal. You get the picture. Through this, I could link to the personal blog, but everything would be seperate from the main site: Themes, plugins, comments and posts.

Will I be able to do this with the new system?

I was looking around for similar solutions, and found this: http://codex.wordpress.org/Installing_Multiple_Blogs. If I understand it correctly, I can make a second WP installation in qieths-quips.com/personal/ on my server, and that would cause visits to that URL to go to my personal blog. Is this correct? I'll be using the single database version, cause I only have one DB on my web hotel, but I am worried that doing this will mess up something on my real blog.

What are the risks of this? What can I do to avoid problems? Or should I just stick it out for another week for when WP 3.0 comes out, and be able to do all of this without any hassle?

The Multi-site feature is simply the integration of WordPressMU functionality into the WordPress core so that users don't have to fiddle with two separate software platforms. It allows users to maintain multiple WordPress-powered sites from a single installation of WordPress. One core fileset to rule them all.

As it stands now, if you want multiple installations of WordPress on a single site, you're either running WordPressMU, or you're running multiple different entire installations of WordPress: 1 set of core files vs X sets of copies of core files (where X is the number of sites) with different databases for each. Its a space, bandwidth and hassle-saver to run WordPressMU (or, multi-site, come 3.0) if you want multiple installations.

For example, WordPress.com (the free hosted sites) runs of WordPressMU. All WordPress.com sites run off a single installation of WordPress, provided by WordPressMU, rather than each having their own private installation of WordPress. This prevents the use of unnecessary bandwidth in having to reload the same core files over and over again across multiple subdomains. There's a primary back-end that the WordPress.com admins use to manage the universal options (like available themes and plugins) and then each subdomain has it's own private back-end within that framework for managing posts, pages, etc.

If you want multiple WordPress-powered sites, simply put, it would be extremely stupid and unnecessary to install the core files more than once to create subdomains with separate WordPress back-ends. What you really want in that case is WordPressMU (or 3.0).

So... it's out now. Should I not install?

I'm wondering the same thing. To install or to not install. That is the question...

I did it and it was fine. I made a backup beforehand (duh) but I went ahead and downloaded through the wp interface automatically. 2 of my widgets no longer work, but everything else seems to be perfect. And they were not important widgets.

The current release is stable (in fact, not much changed from the last couple beta builds). There will be a couple plug-ins that likely won't work, since this is a major build, but otherwise it should be fine to upgrade.