Cornerstone has been a major focus for some time now.  It has been in development for over year now and is currently in use on several sites across the internet.  I’m happy with the progress that has been made, but my ultimate goal has always been to release it to the public so that everyone can benefit from it.  Today, the first public beta of Cornerstone (0.5b) has been released and is now available to all.

The truth is, Cornerstone is a WordPress plugin with a very large scope– so large that it could be a while before it would be ready for public consumption if I waited until all of the features currently being developed were completed.  Instead, I stripped Cornerstone down to a few select features that I thought would be the most useful to users, which I referred to as milestone 1.  I decided to strip things down even further for an initial public release so that I could really zero in on the functionality and make it rock solid for my dear beta testers (you!).

The primary focus of this release is the ability to create sections on a WordPress site and to fill those sections with posts.  This is an oft-requested feature that previously required WordPress users to rely on less-than-ideal hacks like using categories as pseudo sections (read more about why this is bad juju).  Cornerstone provides a much more stable and extensible foundation for building a site upon so that no hacks are required.

Despite a few hiccups (including a motherboard failure and a couple minute code shuffles), the first public beta is out and I couldn’t be happier.  I’m hoping others can benefit from this plugin as well as give me feedback on what they would like me to focus on for the next release.

So what are you waiting for?  Go and get Cornerstone now and start building the site you always dreamed of!