Yesterday WordPress 2.0 was released. I haven’t tried it yet, but hopefully soon I will have time to give it a spin on my test site. The main thing is that some of the plugins that I use might not work yet with WP 2.0, so it might be wise to give the plugin authors a bit of time to update them.

Since my current project is using WP as a CMS for my church web site, I am especially excited about a few of the features.

• WYSIWYG Editor

This new editor will make it even easier for non-techies to create/edit posts or pages. Now they can easily format text without having to insert html tags. One of our design considerations is that ministry leaders should be able to edit pages without knowing any html. But if you don’t like it you can turn it off (sometimes I would rather edit the code).

• User Roles

Here is an explanation of this feature from Asymptomatic:

The “user level” concept of security has now been replaced with Roles. WordPress associates a Role to each user. Roles have Capabilities such as “edit posts” and “activate plugins” that allow certain actions. There is no more concept of hierarchical users, but plugin authors can now create whole new Capabilities to apply proper permission management.

One of the big challenges of a CMS in a volunteer organization like a church is the need to assign limited permissions to different users so that they can edit their section but not mess up the whole site. With WP 2.0 it is possible to define the capabilities of custom designed roles, and to assign more than one role to a user (although there is currently not an interface to support this). This will make WordPress much more powerful as a multi-user CMS. You can read more here.

Posted by Ken in Wordpress