Welcome back! Since my first post, where I demonstrated the simple yet powerful WordPress 3.0 Menu Management functionality, WordPress 3.0 RC1 has been released! With this great new tool, WordPress has become an even more robust option for content management. Now non-technical users can easily manage the navigation (including drop-down menus) of their site through a WYSIWYG environment.

In this second post, I’m going to explore the code generated by this functionality, and give a simple demonstration of how to style and animate the generated menus using  CSS and jQuery. You can then use these skills to develop your own WordPress 3.0 theme and its menus.

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While WordPress 3.0 still hasn’t been officially released, the Beta releases have been available for testing for awhile now. A new feature that is getting a lot of press is the menus option. In this post, I’ll demonstrate how this new functionality works. I think you’ll agree that it has significant potential (see the video at the end of the post). In my second post in this series, I’ll delve into the code and show how to make modifications to the display of the menus, using CSS and jQuery.

To follow along, you’ll need to download WordPress 3.o. You can visit the WordPress development blog to find a link to the latest Beta, and soon version 3.0 will be released officially. WordPress.org provides excellent installation documentation if you need help installing.

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Several sets of usernames and passwords are imperative for making changes and updates to your website.  Especially for sites that are a few years old and were developed by outside developers, these passwords get easily lost – frequently the scenario is the employee that kept track of them has long since left the company or the file storing them has been deleted.

Unfortunately, the time you realize you really need this information is when there is an emergency – and the time it takes to track down the passwords ends up being very expensive.

Examples of such scenarios include:

• The domain name has expired and your website no longer loads. The domain name will be available for purchase to anyone.
• Content errors, such as pricing are on the website and are limiting sales.
• Legal action is threatened about content, and needs to be changed immediately.
• Employees leave under bad circumstances and related content needs to be changed immediately
• 3rd party providers change their services and immediate attention is required to keep your site active or current

Track down the following list of important website related passwords and store them in a safe place that is not tied to an individual employee.  I explain why it’s important and ways to track it down as well.

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