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WordPress 3 review

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Verdict

New theme, menu and multi-site handling see WordPress 3 move up a gear

Review Date: 13 Jul 2010

Reviewed By: Tom Arah

Price when reviewed: Free

Overall Rating

Features & Design
3 stars out of 6

Value for Money
6 stars out of 6

Ease of Use
5 stars out of 6

PCPRO Recommended

WordPress is now seven years old and, with millions of active users, is widely recognised as the world’s most popular blogging platform. The latest release is the open source platform’s 13th major update and is crucial to WordPress’ ambitions to move on from its blog-based origins.

Before you can use WordPress, you need it to be set up on your server. You can do this yourself by downloading the latest version for free from WordPress.org and then installing it on any server supporting at least PHP 4.3 and MySQL 4.1.2. An important advance here is that the first account is no longer automatically set to “admin”, so potential hackers need to work out your account name as well as your password.

If setting up WordPress yourself sounds intimidating, you’ll find most hosting providers now provide one-click installations through their control panels, though you’ll still need to learn how to backup your database. If even that sounds a bit much, you can take advantage of WordPress.com’s ready-to-go free hosting.

Once you’re up-and-running, you manage your WordPress site via the new Dashboard. This is slightly lighter than it was before, and adds contextual help and a few scattered rationalisations. If you’re an existing user who doesn’t want to tamper with an existing site, these are probably the only differences that you’ll notice after upgrading.

If you’re creating a new site or want to rework an existing one, however, WordPress 3 has a lot more to offer. The biggest change is that, after a full five years, the default Kubrick theme has finally been put out to pasture. The replacement, Twenty Ten, is a vast improvement offering attractive, clean lines, easy readability, a large header image and simple layout. Basically it doesn’t look so “bloggy”.

A number of new theme-based advances reinforce this. In particular new APIs for handling headers and backgrounds, it’s much easier for theme developers to enable end user customisation. In addition, WordPress 3’s new “child theme” handling makes it easier to change theme settings while maintaining manually-created CSS-based overrides.

One of the major criticisms of WordPress has been that all its sites look ugly and identical; now, with direct access to more powerful themes and easy customisability built right in to the Dashboard, the quality of end design should leap forward.

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Comments

User comments

Appreciate the CMS focus

Hi Tom,

thanks for the review of Wordpress 3. Will there be reviews of other popular CMSs too? - Drupal 7 is going to be released any day now and I'd really like to see a review of that too.

By longn on 13 Jul 2010

..and Joomla please!

I second the above motion..

By ricksters on 13 Jul 2010

Web designer

Shame on you Tom - forget about hiring a web designer? Wordpress is just a technology so unless you want something based on the default theme or you are able to find a third party theme that fits your needs perfectly, design is still an important part of the process. Every single high quality Wordpress site I've ever seen has been designed.

I specialise in creating Wordpress-based sites using the Thesis theme to help with the customisation. By using Wordpress, I drastically reduce the time it takes to get the structure in place but the design itself takes just as long as ever it did.

Wordpress 3.0, for me, hasn't had much impact. I think the custom entry types is likely to have the greatest potential and the improved updating will save a lot of time but otherwise, it's very much an incremental improvement that arises from running out of version numbers below 3.0!

By KevPartner on 13 Jul 2010

typo3 4.4

I think wordpress is in a difficult spot now. It's a bit too advanced for bloggers, but not advanced enough for anyone wanting a bespoke and professional solution (although I am aware it has been used for such sites, they usually have a lot of source code additions to bring it up to spec).

How about a review of typo3 4.4?

By ralphuk100 on 14 Jul 2010

I second the Joomla review....

owning a web developer company that specialises in Joomla.... www.perfectdesigning.net

... Sorry, couldn't resist it.. ;-)

By CraigieDD on 15 Jul 2010

@Longn, @ricksters, @ralphuk100, @craigieDD
Certainly keen to boost Pro’s CMS coverage and to take a look at significant new releases.
@Kevin
I take the point about the incremental improvement and that for existing users the changes will be minimal. However I’ve recently pointed a number of readers towards wordpress.com (which has effectively been trialling 3.0 for a while now) and the new theme and menu handling means they have got on a lot better and have come back very enthused.
And yes I agree that there is an important and as yet largely unrecognized role for professionals to set up WordPress frameworks for end users to then take over. However, as wordpress.com shows, the majority of WordPress users are definitely DIYers. If all you want to do is lob up a few pages for your shop or whatever, WordPress 3.0 definitely makes it very possible to do it yourself.
@RalphUK
I see what you mean about WordPress being caught between two stools but I think it’s actually pretty well placed. The Dashboard is a bit intimidating for absolute beginners but most users should be able to navigate that and, via its add-ons, the framework can then take you a surprising way before you hit its limitations.

By TomArah on 21 Jul 2010

Late to the party!

I've just got to this review via the best CMS Drupal/Joomla blog post. I've just installed WordPress via MS WebMatrix and it's pretty impressive for a basic CMS. Can you recommend a website with any 'getting started' practical tutorials?

By NickS on 2 Feb 2011

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