WordPress 3.0 Beta 1

WordPress Logo I’ve just upgraded my test blog to Word­Press 3.0 Beta 1, with the new default Twenty Ten Theme. It’s yet another beau­ti­ful evo­lu­tion for my favorite CMS, Word­Press. That’s right, I didn’t say “blog­ging engine”.

I’ve been using Word­Press as a CMS for a while already, and no, there’s no rea­son a Word­Press site has to look like a blog, or that it even needs to look par­tic­u­larly “WordPress-y,” though a lot of them tend to. The give­away is often in the post com­ments area, which a great many themes do not bother to cus­tomize very exten­sively, though they should. (Mine is cus­tomized to a degree, even if not exten­sively.) I had read some­place that in 3.0 it would be eas­ier to cus­tomize this part of a theme, but I haven’t dug that deeply. In any event, a theme devel­oper with a mod­icum of php-chops should be able to hack out a cus­tom look for it even in the old system.

A Wee Bit of Fanfare

TheWritersCollective.org Last night I was at Aqua Books for the offi­cial launch of the new web­site for The Writ­ers Col­lec­tive of Man­i­toba, pic­tured in the tiny thumb­nail. Last night I pro­jected some much larger screen­shots of it onto a large screen while I droned on about all it could do. Then Eve turned on the “Applause” sign. Not long after that, we ate cook­ies and drank hot choco­late and punch and beer and wine. But not all of them, and not all at once. My point in men­tion­ing it is that I devel­oped the site for the Col­lec­tive in the course of my work under the name of WebRig​gers​.net. I think the site will work out swim­mingly for them.