Here’s a quick rundown of what’s got bloggers and content management system (CMS) folks amped up:

Custom Post Types

At this point, WordPress has two default types of content, posts and pages. (You can read posts on this blog and you can view extra pages through the navigation bar at the top of the page. Other themes may have different link placement.) In version 3.0, you can create custom post types with their own attributes for things like press pages, client testimonials, portfolio display, podcasts, video libraries, you name it. WordPress users are not forced into jury rigging posts or pages to fit their needs.

Menu Management

WordPress 3.0 takes control over navigation menus to a whole new level. Using the drag and drop user interface, you can create menus with internal links, external links, category or tag pages, or whatever you choose. Then you can use and manage these menus as a widget in the link management screen.

Custom Taxonomies

The ability to create taxonomies enhances WordPress’ standing as a true CMS. By default, you have the ability to create categories and tags within your site, but now you can add additional layers of meta data, and even make them hierarchical. For example, on this blog, there are over-arching subject categories for each post and more specific tags. Each of these allows readers and search engines to find topics of interest more easily. With version 3.0, I could choose to create another taxonomy for rowing and label posts with names such as sculling, sweeps, coaching, coxswainship, etc. and provide deeper layers of categorization and searchability. I’ve worked on websites with single-layer taxonomies as well as websites with multi-relational and hierarchical taxonomies, and this feature excites the web geek in me.

Multi-site

WordPress 3.0 now allows the management of multiple websites (with different domains and/or sub-domains). The former WordPress multi-user tool has been integrated into the newest version. An average blogger will probably not need this feature because you need to know a bit of code and how to configure server settings, however, for those who run blogging networks, news sites or companies with many employees with branded blogs, this feature is likely to raise an eyebrow or two.

Shortlinks

As Twitter and Facebook become more important, the need to shorten your URLs also becomes more important. With the wp.me URL shortener, you don’t have to rely on other URL shorteners such as TinyURL or bit.ly and can keep your branding intact. That’s right, you can shorten your URL and keep your own domain name. The WordPress blog has more on that feature.

Author Templates

Now everyone gets personal branding! Despite how you feel about personal branding (and I love Doc Searls’ insights here), you can create individual author templates, which are great for multi-author blogs such as this one or if you want to apply different styles or layouts to author pages.

Select Username and Password During WordPress Instillation

Anyone installing a new WordPress blog before 3.0 had their master account default to “admin” as the user name and a password was auto-generated. Now you can create your own user name during install and provide a little more security.

Other New Stuff

If you’re interested in the entire list of new features, upgrades and changes, check out the Codex page for WordPress 3.0.

©2012 Blog de Puree. All Rights Reserved.

I was impressed with D.J.’s last blog post. His use of yachtsmen vernacular and the emotion of a captain that exuded from his post was really fantastic.

“That the sea looks like a pancake from your window doesn’t mean squat!! Even as I was depositing him [The yacht's owner] into the tender to go ashore he asked me if I was sure. “It doesn’t look so bad.” I assured him that outside it wouldn’t be pretty and that it would only be getting worse. He left and we had a washing machine ride home, surfing some large swells. Always a strange sensation and humbling when a fifty-eight ton yacht’s engines are rendered null and a swell that’s moving faster than you picks you up and pushes you forward. Great for gas mileage, not so good for the nerves.”

His last post (part of it quoted above) brought to mind two of my favorite nautical authors, C.S. Forester (Horatio Hornblower series) and Patrick O’Brian (Aubrey-Maturin series) because his use of authentic boatsman language accurately helped to paint a vivid picture of his experience. Forester’s and O’Brian’s books are laden with juicy parlance from the heyday of the age of sail and the prime of the British Navy, and a nautical enthusiast can sink one’s teeth into it.

Personally, I think he should keep all this in a journal and write a book some day. I think that yachting enthusiasts worldwide would enjoy following the story of Captain D.J.

©2012 Blog de Puree. All Rights Reserved.

According to TechCrunch, this type of application only exists in academic and enterprise content management systems, not for the blogosphere. Demos are available now for WordPress, Typepad and Blogger in a Firefox browser.

I haven’t tried Zemanta yet, but I immediately thought of a similar software company that my father-in-law started called 3DWriter for schools and students. The concept is similar in that it enables linking text to relevant websites and Internet sources. Much like many current systems, the act of linking is a manual process, however, and one needs to highlight text, find the relevant link, click the link icon and insert the URL. Just like I do on this blog.

Zemanta has taken this to a new level; it automatically culls the information for you, saving the manual legwork of finding the information yourself. As an oft-lazy blogger, I’m excited to see how it develops because linking is a great way to enhance the richness of information available for a blog post and it adds to one’s search engine optimization.

As for 3DWriter, at $249 a pop to license it for an entire school (Compared to the obscene prices for Microsoft academic licensing), it’s an absolute steal for a product that students can use to create robust reports and term papers that utilize basic Web technology and concepts while developing their writing skills. It also develops research competency using the Internet. Combine that with a teacher that knows how to bring technology into the classroom and you have a powerful and affordable teaching tool.

©2012 Blog de Puree. All Rights Reserved.

The news is that Matt hired Andy Peatling, “the developer behind BuddyPress, a social network built on top of WordPress. BuddyPress will now become an official WordPress project.”

As many of our readers know, we use WordPress and love its functionality and ease of use. There are a lot of tools, called plugins that can be installed easily into the software and this will take advantage of WordPress’s application program interface (API), an interface for allowing a program to communicate and work with another program. Typically, these exist within online applications.

Despite the conceived glut of social networks and programs already on the ‘Net, Mullenweg said, “The world doesn’t need another social network, it needs a thousand networks that let you own your data and interconnect using open standards.”

I agree. Although a goodly portion of Internet users know and use sites such as MySpace and Facebook, open source and small communities really make the Internet a more interesting space. Using open and common standards, it’s easier for all these smaller communities to connect and communicate. While the larger networks do have their uses and are great financial successes, they do have limitations with flexibility and functionality.

I can’t wait to see what the folks at WordPress come up with.

©2012 Blog de Puree. All Rights Reserved.

I hope it’s not frustrating to our readers. The last design, while cool as hell had too many bugs that I was not able to fix.

This new design, called 3K2, is based off the original WordPress theme called Kubrick. We felt that this three-column design brought more information above the fold (old newspaper expression adopted for the web which designates how much information shows up before the bottom of the browser window before having to scroll down).

We do hope to make it a bit less, um, blue. So stay tuned!

©2012 Blog de Puree. All Rights Reserved.

Click here to view the embedded video.

©2012 Blog de Puree. All Rights Reserved.

With this new design, we’ve decided to incorporate graphics that really depicted what this blog is all about, a blend of many things. And of course, we’ve got the main players up above.

Some important facts about our new look:

• The theme design is called Red Dragon and is free—available for the WordPress blog platform. The original theme is designed by Milo, a German graphic and web designer (and a passionate surfer chick), who has some other wicked cutting edge themes available for WordPress. Many thanks to her for the original design. Thanks, Milo, we love it!
• The graphics of the theme are changed somewhat by Randye. She saw something really cool and figured out a way to personalize and make it even better for our blog. Randye is also a graphic designer and interior decorator and if you’re interested in hiring her (And you should be), check out her website and online portfolio.
• We also would not have been able to do this if it wasn’t for Eric, a colleague and good friend of mine. Eric is a web designer and UI developer who helped us tweak some technical and design settings, allowing us to personalize the look and feel, as well as flip things around on the page a little. Check out his blog and information at Bogey Web Design.

We hope you dig the new look and feel. Please do leave us comments and let us know what you think?

©2012 Blog de Puree. All Rights Reserved.

©2012 Blog de Puree. All Rights Reserved.

We’ve been using it about a year now and we’re very pleased with it.

Within the past six months, I’ve also been reading about how it can be easily used as a full content management system for websites. The folks over at WordPress and the development community have added so many features that a person can build in a slew of manageable web pages in addition to using it as just a blogging platform. Many big sites have implemented it quite successfully on small and large scales. Even the Wall Street Journal, a site that is oft reported to give blogging a bad rap, uses it to manage its small, but growing, stable of bloggers.

However, I wanted to point out a hyper-local site, or niche website, that has also successfully harnessed the power of WordPress since February, although on a small scale. The Toy Soldier, a hobby and comic book shop in Amesbury, MA. (I’ve mentioned the shop before in regard to purchasing Buffy the Vampire Slayer comics.) While the shop’s needs are nothing like larger publishers, they’ve taken a simple use case and done it well.

The home page is also the page where the site’s blog resides, so visitor’s are immediately met with the most recent news or thoughts from the store’s owner, Mick. In the left-hand navigation bar, you can click “About Us” to find out more about the store, similar to our “About Paul and Randye” page. There is also a page for directions.

The site also has a user forum powered by Invision Power Services, which was integrated with WordPress. The Toy Soldier intelligently requires registration before it can be viewed or used. The great part about proprietary and opensource forum software packages working with WordPress is that they are an integral way for community members to be able to contact each other and engage, the key to the survival of any group. Forum software suites are very popular and easy to manage, but we may see a decline as more sites figure out how to let communities form sub-groups themselves within their sites. But that’s a topic for another post.

Finally, the site has a link to its online store, which is also a key element for retailers in this day and age.

If you’re a comic book collector, gamer or an online pro interested in seeing how smaller web sites handle their content with WordPress, I suggest taking a look around the Toy Soldier site. It has certainly caused me to think twice about reformatting our entire web presence as well.

©2012 Blog de Puree. All Rights Reserved.

The site contains an archive of fishing articles, a photo gallery, a Reel-Time gear shop, fly-tying advice and articles, an east coast listing of guides and shops and an active forum. There’s also a fish report that tells you where and when the hot spots are during the fishing season.

With all due respect to my mentor, the site’s other founders and its members, I feel that over 10 years later the site is now “old school.” Especially with the recent arrival of Angling Masters International, that, according to a recent post on TechCrunch, is “a social networking site for recreational fisherman that also supports the creation of user generated online fishing tournaments.”

The site’s users can create their own pages and groups, a la MySpace, which they can personalize with photos, links and maintain blogs. The coolest part is that users can generate online fishing tournaments. Duncan Riley from the TechCrunch blog found that users can compete with one another across the North America.

“The vast differences in rivers, lakes and the many fish species inhabiting them is overcome with an interesting twist. Length conversion tables and a series of algorithms allow fish of one species to be compared to fish of another, no matter where they were caught so all participants compete on a level playing field. 12 species of fish are covered and the back end considers how large each species typically grows in each geographic region and scores fish caught accordingly.”

To top it off, cheating can be stopped by requiring the use of witnesses and Angling Masters Measuring Tape for accurate measurements. Online fishing competitions that attempt to stop cheating. How cool is that?

I checked out the site a little more to see how the site could be used on an even larger scale in addition to its singular web 2.0 community features, which is an area of the site called “Cabins.” Users can also create their own communities or an online retail presence in an area of the site called “Marinas.” You can take it a step further by building a “Lodge” that is a community that has stronger ties with the angling community, is also a viable online business, but it looks like terms must be negotiated with the site’s owners for what is probably some sort of profit-sharing relationship.

From an “old school” user perspective, it’s hard to give up the formal editorial articles and guides to this, that or the other on micro-niche websites. But this new model, based entirely on users connecting and sharing their experiences and personal knowledge is at the forefront of today’s web communities. I’m excited to see if Angling Masters International can reel in a permanent place in today’s Web 2.0 culture.

©2012 Blog de Puree. All Rights Reserved.