Since its inception WordPress has lacked one feature that made for a better user experience. A custom post type. If you wanted to write a post about recipes one day, then have a photo post the next day, then maybe a journal post, each one would require a different data set. A recipe post for example may contain ingredients, measurements, and instructions. For the photo enthusiast you might include details about F stop and lighting. For all of these types of posts you had one choice. ”Posts”. WordPress forced you to fit your square pegs into a round hole. Although you could always include this information within the post content area, it required you, as the content creator, to go through countless format setups to find the right mixture of presentational items.
Well, fear no more mighty wordsmith. WordPress 3.0 has introduced the cure for what ails you: custom post types. With custom post types the admin level user experience can now include any post type that you feel like creating. When you visit the WordPress dashboard instead of just seeing the familiar “Posts”, you can have “Recipe Post”, “Camera Post”, or any other type of post you’d like. With theme customization these post types can then be styled to look a certain way, and entering meta data becomes a much more user friendly endeavor on the backend.
After having created a few custom post types myself for current projects, I believe that this feature will provide a surge in the already formidable install base of WordPress. But as is usually the case, with great power comes great responsibility. While WordPress 3.0 makes tremendous strides towards creating these custom post types, the actual creation of them is still in the realm of the theme or plugin developer. That said, I would expect to see several plugins released within the next month or so that will make this process very easy for the end user. When WordPress flashes that “Upgrade Available” banner at the top of your dashboard, go ahead and click “Upgrade Now”. You won’t regret it.
