There is a new version of WordPress coming and I am pretty excited about it. I am a data geek. I love information and I like to organize it in different ways to make it accessible and interesting to others. WordPress 3.0 is going to make it easier for you to organize your information so it is more interesting and effective for your readers. It is all about custom taxonomy.

Custom taxonomy has actually been around for awhile in WordPress but you needed to be a coding geek to make it work. Each version since 2.8 has been making custom taxonomies easier and easier to implement and WordPress 3.0 takes another big leap. I won’t tell you that it won’t take any coding, well because it will. BUT it will take a lot less coding and it is a much easier to do. That also means that you can expect a slew of plugins to become available in the near future to help you out.

The other new thing about custom taxonomies is that they can be hierarchical. This adds a whole new dimension to the way that you can organize your information.  This is going to be really big news especially for review sites and e-commerce sites. I am volunteering my web development and design skills to an international volunteer organization. Custom taxonomies are going to help me organize their site by countries and volunteer opportunities.

Custom post types are a new feature with WordPress 3.0. Although you have been able to assign pages to custom page templates for awhile, now you can do it with posts as well. I blog about beer and wine at Wine Beer Washington. Although I enjoy them both, there are some obvious differences between the two.  My readers like to know what kind of hops are in the beer but I don’t want to include hops information on a post about wine. With 3.0, I can create a custom post type for beer that includes taxonomy about hops and malt and a custom post type for wine that has taxonomy for vineyards.

Are you ready to learn more about WordPress 3.0?