One of the major anticipated updates is without a doubt the custom types. Untill now you could only add one type of post and if you wanted to have different post types you could either use custom fields or the plugin fileflutter. But now, thanks to a small peace of code, you can add different custom types with their own menu and settings.

Here follows the code to register a new post type, how easy can it be?

register_post_type('podcast', array(
'label' => __('Podcasts'),
'singular_label' => __('Podcast'),
'public' => true,
'show_ui' => true,
'capability_type' => 'post',
'hierarchical' => false,
'rewrite' => false,
'query_var' => false,
'supports' => array('title', 'editor', 'author')
));

New registration process

Finally we can choose our own username and password instead of creating the default admin profile. This is also a lot safer because most hacker knows the default username of the first profile created on your wordpress site is admin, and will use it to hack into your site.

New menu management feature

Instead of updating your theme files online you can now easily manage your menu from your wordpress admin panel. how sweet is that, huh?

Custom backgrounds for themes

Another great update of wordpress 3.0 is the ability to customize your header from your wordpress administration panel. Just click on the image you want to use or upload your own image. It’s that simple, even a monkey can do it.

New theme Twenty Ten

With all the sublime updates of wordpress 3.0 (custom post types, menu management, edit header…) it is obvious to release new default template. This template is perfect to get started in wordpress 3.0 as it holds all the new template features.

Other updates

• Bulk theme update ability
• Improved custom post types
• Improved custom taxonomies
• Standalone WordPress and WPMU code merged and is called Multisite

Need more reasons? check the Codex

Download wordpress 3.0

The developers of wordpress announced last week that the Wordpress 3.0 RC1 was released and could be downloaded at http://wordpress.org/wordpress-3.0-RC1.zip.

Like it is mentioned in their post, RC comes right after the beta but just before the final release, wordpress 3.0 should be ready but their might still be some bugs.

Useful reading

• Introducing WordPress 3 Custom Taxonomies

• Custom Post Types in WordPress 3.0

• WordPress 3.0: Multisite Domain Mapping Tutorial

Got your own reason to love wordpress? we’d love to hear about it :)

Our goal

www.iv-designs.org

Let’s get started

First of all you must design your ribbons, if you don’t have time or don’t want to waste time designing ribbons you can always purchase the Web ribbon set at graphicriver.net.

When saving your ribbons make sure that u save them using the name of the category. so if you created a category Icons make sure to save it as Icons_ribbon.png (case sensitive !!).

When finished, upload all the ribbons to the images map of your wordpress theme.

The code

open your index.php and find the openingstag for your post (this could be a partial search!)

The theme at iv-designs.org starts with

<div id="site-<?php the_ID(); ?>">

and in the wordpress default theme

<div <?php post_class() ?> id="post-<?php the_ID(); ?>">

After this line add

<?php
$cat = get_the_category($post->ID);
$category = $cat[0]->cat_name;
?>
<div><img src="<?php echo bloginfo('url'); ?>/wp-content/themes/YOUR_THEME/images/<?php echo $category; ?>_ribbon.png" alt="" /></div>

Let’s have a look at this code, first we grab the category of that particular post ($post->ID). This will return an array and it’s the name we want ($cat[0]->cat_name)which we then store in the variable $category.

We then create a new div with class catthumb, and open the image tag with the complete path to the images map of our theme (make sure to replace YOUR_THEME with name of your theme). we then use the $category variable (which contains the name of the category where the post was posted in) to link to the correct image.

the only thing left to do is style it to position the ribbon where we want
add this to your style.css

.catthumb
{
height:115px;
left:1px;
position:absolute;
top:1px;
width:116px;
}

You can always set left and top higher or lower to fit your needs.

Things to keep in mind

• make sure the height and width is the same as your image.
• The post div should have (in the css) position: relative; otherwise your ribbon will be positioned absolutely according to your document instead of your post div.

Conclusion!

I hope you learned how to make the category of your post stand out more and how to manipulate your url with variables to make it more dynamic and link to the correct image instead of using a switch to go through all your categories.

This will be our end result

In this tutorial we will be using the wordpress default theme to show you how easy it is to create a showcase theme. First replace the narrowcolumn class in your style.css with the following

.narrowcolumn {
float: left;
padding: 0 0 20px 15px;
margin: 0px 0 0;
width: 540px;
}

Open index.php and find the code in the image below.

Replace it with this code.

<div class="showcase">

Add the following styles to your stylesheet.

.showcase
{
width: 250px;
height: 270px;
float: left;
border: 1px solid #CFCFCF;
margin: 4px;
padding: 4px;
}

.showcase h2
{
padding: 2px;
margin: 0px;
}

.showcasethumb
{
width: 230px;
height: 160px;
}

Back to index.php find the following code

<?php the_content('Read the rest of this entry &amp;raquo;'); ?>

Replace it with

<?php $homethumb = get_post_meta($post->ID,'homethumb', true);?>
<img class="showcasethumb" src="<?php echo bloginfo('url')."/wp-content/uploads/".$homethumb; ?>.jpg" alt=""/>

2. Usage

First create a 230*160 image preview, when creating a new post upload your preview image.

Copy paste the title of the image (see picture above) in your new post as a new custom field, call that custom field homethumb and click add custom field.

3. Plugins to install

As you can see from the end result preview we have some star ratings, you will need to install a plugin for this. The plugin name is WP-PostRatings by Lester Chan, you can install it by going to the plugin section of your site, go to add new and type WP-PostRatings in the search. Then just click install

In the index.php find the following code

Below add

<?php if(function_exists('the_ratings')) { the_ratings(); } ?>

I modified the settings of the rating plugin so it would show only the star rating and no text. You are free to do whatever you want.

4. Examples

• www.iv-designs.org
• http://themeforest.net/item/design-showcase/19791
• http://themeforest.net/item/showcase-theme/18025
• http://themeforest.net/item/folio-showcase/45056
• http://wthemes.com/

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