OUR BLOG

WordPress 3.0 Released

Written by Kyle Pearce on June 17, 2010

Today Wordpress released its highly anticipated Wordpress 3.0 “Thelonious” update. The new release is a huge step forward in Wordpress’ transition from a blogging platform to a more flexible, full-featured content management (CMS) system.

Wordpress continues to be one of the most popular blogging and CMS platforms with over 10.3 million downloads of the previous version 2.9. This exciting new version maintains Wordpress’ famous lightweight, easy-to-install and simple-to-use user interface.

Some of the key new features:

• A better designed and more easily customizable default theme called TwentyTen
• The integration of WordPress Multi-User so you can run multiple websites from the same administration dashboard.
• Custom background support, easily update your background without modifying any code
• You can now create custom post types for different kinds of content. Previously, the options were limited to writing a new blog post or a static page.
• Easy menu creation and management from the WordPress backend where you can now create multiple menus, categories and custom external/internal links on your navigation menus.
• Custom taxonomies to include more complex tagging and organization of content.
• New developer API to make custom Wordpress themes even more powerful.
• Lighter interface with contextual help available on every screen.

Watch the new WordPress 3.0 video tour to see all the new features:

If you’re thinking of upgrading your current version of Wordpress, you can use the auto-upgrade feature from the Wordpress Dashboard. Fortunately, most themes and plugins will continue to work with Wordpress 3.0 but make sure you backup your database and files before upgrading.

If you want give the new version a try, you can download Wordpress 3.0 at the official website here. The developers have also posted a live download counter where you can see how many people are downloading the new version. At the time of publishing, Wordpress 3.0 had been downloaded 19,702 times (not bad for one day!).