I really enjoy creating websites in WordPress. Don’t misunderstand me. I don’t mean I enjoy creating the sites where you download a free template from somewhere and just start up a generic blog. I like taking a unique, custom website design that we’ve created and bringing it to life with the WordPress framework.
The generic pieces of a content management system are already in place. Password protected areas, search engine friendly URLs, content formatting, and heck even simple things like date formatting are already in place with WordPress. I don’t have to keep reinventing the wheel by integrating those elementary pieces into every website I create. Instead I get to focus on adding the unique touches that are only going to appear on the particular site I’m working on right then.
Need a dynamic photo gallery that works in some crazy way? Cool. I want to spend my time on that. Some neat jQuery slider effects on the home page? Rad. Let’s do it. Using WordPress lets me focus more on doing those cool things because I know the administrative login has already been programmed, tested, and debugged.
So I already love the current version of WordPress, but the latest version (expected to be released in late May or early June) adds a few key features that make my job even easier. They give me some flexibility to customize your site even more. There are some new features that are definitely cool (like WordPress MU assimiliation, new install options, an updated default theme, and custom author templates) but don’t effect most of our clients’ websites.
I do want to talk about the two new features that are going to have a big impact, though.
Menus
So up until now the navigation menu in your WordPress site has usually just been a tree of all your static pages. Now I could go into the code and exclude certain pages, but other than adding a new page, there wasn’t much you could do to change your navigation. Even reordering your pages requires special hoop jumping.
Now there is an interface for you to take control. Reorder the links. Add a link to another website right in your top navigation. Make one of your blog categories a top-level link. Go crazy. Need to move a subpage under another page. Just click and drag it to where it needs to go. Click this image to see a larger version:
Custom Post Types and Taxonomies
By default WordPress lets you have blog posts and static pages. Unless you really dive into the code and do some tinkering, all posts look the same and all pages look the same. But imaging you have a website that talks about books. Wouldn’t it be handy if the Grapes of Wrath page didn’t look just like your About Us page? With custom post types I can create a Books section in your administrative area. Any books page could be structured completely different with a picture of the cover in one corner and everything arranged differently.
Not impressed yet? Well WordPress makes it easy for me to setup your site so that you can enter certain types of information for each book. Author. Date published. Number of pages. Instead of those bits of information being buried in a paragraph, I can build your Books pages so that the name of the author is always right there under the book cover. And when you click on John Steinbeck you’ll get a list of all the books on your site that he’s written.
What Does This Mean?
The bottom line is pretty simple: some website features that had previously been extremely costly are now much easier to implement. Hurry up, WordPress. Let’s get that stable release out the door. I’m ready.
