WordPress 3.0 Released: New Blog Theme!

Before today, I wasn’t all that impressed with WordPress 3.0. I had been using several release candidates over the past month or so and aside from the new update mechanism (which is very nice!), I really didn’t see much that sparked my interest. With yesterday’s release, I upgraded and it went smoothly as always… but didn’t do much digging around. Why bother when I’d been using the RC builds for so long, right? I’ve known about the new default theme “TwentyTen” that is finally replacing Kubrick but had never looked into exactly what was new aside from basic visual differences.

I’ve been using a number of themes designed by others over the past three years or so with the last one being Traction. As my needs changed from time to time, it was much simpler to just adopt someone else’s design rather than going through the trouble of mucking around and getting my own up and running. Theme designs I’d done in the past had been based off of Kubrick, but as that theme aged, I wanted features that simply were not present there… so found myself jumping from theme to theme as my needs dictated. This has worked out okay- but I found myself regularly dissatisfied with certain quirks, bugs, or deficiencies. For instance, the Traction theme kept destroying my RSS feed. I had to make my own modifications and upgrades would inevitably start the cycle over again. A big pain in the ass…

So today I looked into TwentyTen to see what could be done with it. Hats off you you guys and girls over at WordPress! This is a great basic theme for customizing that includes all the new functionality introduced since Kubrick was released, and the ability to create child themes. What makes child themes so cool is that when the parent theme is updated, it isn’t going to wipe out all your customizations… yet you still have this nice, solid foundation to build off of that can be updated as necessary. So I created this current theme based off of TwentyTen and am really liking it so far. If I need something in the future, I’ll just do my own modifications. With the ability to push updates without destroying themes, I expect this one will not age so poorly either.

The theme is already HTML5 compliant (for whatever that is worth) but I also tossed in some CSS3 and Google Font Directory stuff to make everything nice and forward-looking! Want to know what else is new in WordPress 3.0? There are plenty of others talking about custom menus, custom post types, multiuser integration, et cetera; here’s the official scoop.

I was wrong about this release. It is the most useful to date on all fronts and am hugely impressed.

Look at that! Wrote something that wasn’t Flash or AIR related!


UPDATE: After posting this, I was contacted by @drewstrojny regarding the feed bug with Traction. In a matter of hours he reported the bug as filed and fixed. A patch is located here. That’s responsive!

2 thoughts on “WordPress 3.0 Released: New Blog Theme!”

  1. Pingback: Wordpress Belarus » Blog Archive » Wordpress 3.0 Released: New Blog Theme! | In Flagrante Delicto!

  2. I updated my blog to latest wordpress 3.0 version and first thing which I noticed is change in the dashboard layout.
    After that I activated the network settings to let my blog behave like MU.
    So far I have not seen any known issue apart from Google Xml sitemap plugin showing error when I enabled multi-site option.
    I’m waiting to see a quick update for Google Xml sitemap plugin, so that it can work without any issue with multi-site,or else any better alternate plugin.

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