“what could I do…” he thought. His hand is moving the computer mouse aimlessly. He’s looking for something but does not know for sure. There is this idea, about getting some programming excitement, the like he gets when a crazy idea pops up and he is thrown in the zone. Then suddenly “Oh god…” A few frenetic clicks later he is on his blog back end.
It’s one of those WordPress blogs. he’s got hundreds (more like 4) of them but that one has something special. The cursor fly hover the left hand side menu and he finally gets to the upgrade page. There lies two buttons: “Upgrade now” and “Download nightly build”.
Without thinking too much he chooses the first option. The page reload and the upgrade status starts to print on the page. “… upgrade successful”. He load the dashboard and there it is. He could only hope to see those words: “You are using WordPress 3.0-alpha.”
That’s it. Everything he has been waiting for is coming back in memory. “The menu builder!, I need to test the menu builder….”
So here we are. I have just upgraded this site to WordPress 3.0-alpha, using the Beta Tester plugin. I don’t know how long the 3.0 alpha has been out and I can’t believe I have not tried to do the upgrade before.
The most anticipated feature, for me anyway, is this new menu builder. It was first coded by the nice guys at WooThemes and then included in the core by the WordPress team. What I can say so far is that it is has good as it gets.
Here are a few screenshots of it in action:
The menu page with you menu in the middle and the link creators on the right. You can add pages, categories, custom and links. Once you’ve added an element to the menu it appears in the list in the middle of the screen. From there you can reorganise them by drag and drop, create nested menus, edit/delete stuff
Here is the edit box for a menu element.
Apart from the menu there a loads of other improvements. Here are a few:
New default theme
With it comes a new header selector. No gradient anymore but nice images =)
..and custom background image
And another small one: choose your admin password during install:
