Hi, i found your blog through search engine.you have the amazing knowledge it is such a nice information. Thanks for sharing the nice information.
Why invest large sums of money on a website when you are going to use photos taken with a $200 camera? 2 days ago — @3PointRoss
Wordpress 3.0 is really a revolutionary upgrade compared to Wordpress 2.0. With integrated multi-users, custom post types, custom background images, custom taxonomies, the new menu system and custom header images it is now both a blogging powerhouse and enterprise capable CMS out of the box. Despite the official release only being a week or two ago there are already some powerful plugins that will help you take advantage of the new features.
While you are upgrading to Wordpress 3.0 don't hesitate to install these plugins as well.
One of the powerful new features to Wordpress is the ability to create custom post types. This has long been a lacking feature in Wordpress. The custom post types allows you to define custom "types" of content such as listings, locations, employee bios, etc...
The usage of custom post types is not exactly straight forward however. You have to be pretty comfortable working with your functions.php file and even then it is time consuming. Custom Post Type UI allows you to easily define and customize your post types through the Wordpress administration panel using a GUI. Clearly an essential plugin for Wordpress 3.0.
Download Custom Post Type UI Here
Inspired by Custom Post Type this plug-in takes the same concept to the next level and gives you additional control and customization.
The ability to define custom tags and taxonomies opens up endless possibilities for Wordpress. We can now use Wordpress to develop custom taxonomies like colors, sizes, locations, etc... Again, list custom post types it can be a bit complicated to figure out and work with. This plugin adds many tools including custom post types and taxonomies management and widget for taxonomies terms cloud.
Download GD Taxonomies Tools Here
While Wordpress Multi User has been around for awhile the new Wordpress 3.0 has merged the two versions of the site and allow the easy development of networks of sites. This plugin is able to turn your multi-site installation of WordPress into many multi-site networks, all surrounding one central user base.
WP Multi Network allows cape wearing super admins to create new network collections of sites, allowing for infinitely extensible site, network, and domain arrangements.
Download WP Multi Networks Here
Once you take advantage of Wordpress custom post types and the menu management tool you are very likely to run into a situation in which you want the title of the page and the title used in the menu would be different. Some content management systems already take advantage of this and now with this plug-in Wordpress does too.
WP Title 2 lets you easily define a different menu label than your page title. This makes the site easier to administer and can improve usability of the site as well.
Have an existing post that you want to change to a different custom post type? Rather than deleting and recreating simply use this plugin that gives you the capability to switch between posts, pages and custom post types.
Download Post Type Switcher Here
While post thumbnails were introduced earlier this is still a great plugin. If you have ever wanted the ability to have more than one post thumbnail than this plugin is for you.
Download Multi Post Thumbnails Here
Have some feedback? Leave a commentHi, i found your blog through search engine.you have the amazing knowledge it is such a nice information. Thanks for sharing the nice information.
I think a lot of the old plugins will need some work doing with them to make them work with the new version 3.0
great article, i’m looking if there’s a plugin that let’s you feature posts from any blog in your network, into your main website, that way would be easy to have multiple members and display in the main site what is best.
have you heard of anything like this?
I haven’t heard of a single one of these plugins. But GD Taxonomies sounds good, I’ll check it out. Nice resource
Hi A.Hariri,
These do store things into the database so I wouldn’t worry about upgrading. However a lot of these methods are actually typically stored in the functions.php – so removing the plugin will often nuke the work you have done. Something important to keep in mind.
If you are worried about it, doing the hard coded method might be a better approach.
Hope this helps!
-Ross
Great list!
I just updated one of my blogs and I am looking for a way to easily add custom types and your list really helped.
My only questions is, if new versions comes out, will the custom types/data/taxnomoies added by these plugins be still in the database and still be useable? In other way, do they add their structure of data to the DB or do they rely on the funtionalities made available by WP and therefore, any update in the future should not have the effect of not being able to use/show any custom types along with their posts. I hope I was able to explain my question.
Thank you!
Multiple post thumbnails don’t work for me. Using the latest version of WP 3.
@Ayman – Absolutely I would agree. Before 3.0 I would default to Silverstripe for a larger more “enterprise” style site. However now I wouldn’t hesitate to use Wordpress for huge corporate sites requiring complex content types or functionality. Hopefully in future releases these plug-ins will be built in, but in the mean time they are quite handy.
@Andrew – I wouldn’t be surprised since WP 3.0 has some overlapping capabilities with Thesis, there are probably some incompatibilities out there. However I am sure they will get that sorted out fairly quickly.
Haven’t upgraded my sites to 3.0 yet but plan to this week. Thanks for the tips on the plugins, although I suspect most won’t work with the Thesis framework until the next version is out. I’ve seen people reporting problems with WP 3.0 and Thesis. Maybe a good idea for another post!
Thanks alot for sharing this list Ross.
with the release of WordPress 3.0, it’s now a fully fledged CMS, don’t you think?
I also think the makers of WordPress should have included those custom post types plugins into the core of WP.
on August 27, 2010
Helpful info there you have, this post saves me some time from searching. Thanks for sharing