Why We Desperately Need the New Menu Functionality in WordPress 3.0
There’s been a lot of talk about the new and highly anticipated Menu functionality in the upcoming WordPress 3.0 release (scheduled for early May) potentially being removed.
We at iThemes were/are VERY MUCH looking forward to the menus in 3.0 … and had already been preparing for this amazing new feature idea.
Here’s the top reason all of us theme developers are so excited about it: It solves a fundamental customer need we’ve seen in the past two years.
In January 2008, we released our first theme — Essence — and out of the gate focused on using WordPress as a CMS — and not simply just for blogs. We see the powerful capabilities of running websites for the millions of small businesses and organizations out there.
Thus … we’ve consistently been pushing for the advancement of using WordPress as a powerful CMS (it already is, by the way) … and the Menu functionality is a key component of that. In fact, we’ve held off on our own plans for a Menu Builder because we prefer one to be rolled into core.
Here are some of the comments our team and others in the WordPress development community have posted on this subject:
- Carl Hancock of Gravity Forms
- Grant Griffiths of Headway
- My comments
- Matt Danner of iThemes
- Dustin Bolton of PluginBuddy
Make your voice be heard here too.
Rate this ➜
Keep Up With iThemes
iThemes loves, uses
and recommends HostGator for WordPress hosting
for $7.95 per month.
2 Responses to “Why We Desperately Need the New Menu Functionality in WordPress 3.0”
Leave a Reply
Get Theme Discounts
& Special Offers
Be the first to know when we release new themes and get special discounts! PLUS, get the 60-page Getting Started with WordPress and 8+ other ebooks free.
I completely agree. The current menu system in WordPress really reduces its value as a CMS. I just finished a website for a group that was excited about how they could maintain the site on their own using the WP admin. That excitement was deflated considerably when they finally asked how they could make additions and changes to the site’s menu structure. The changes were reasonable, but they simply weren’t possible for end users through the current WP admin page. One change (involving multiple sets of page menus) really needed the new 3.0 menu system, because *I* wouldn’t know how to pull that off myself and I tinker with WordPress in some way or another all the time.
I don’t want to see core become flaky, but I’d delay Mu integration and dedicate more resources to getting 3.0 menus correct and out the door…
P.S. – After the new menu system is integrated, I’d love to see iThemes take it one step further with improved menu styling in the Chris’ style manager…
The newest version of the “Menus” interface is now in the latest nightly of beta1. Looks great!
Leon McKee