WordPress 3.0 is named after Thelonious Monk, a Jazz giant whose improvisations have inspired this new version of WordPress to new heights of creativity. The first thing you will notice after taking the plunge is a lighter, less distracting dashboard theme. This will help you get down to business and focus on what’s important.
Unified Updates
The first important new feature to take note of is how WordPress now handles updates. There is one page under your Dashboard that shows you whether your plugins, themes, and WordPress installs itself are all up to date. If not, you can handle all your updates from one place automatically. WordPress puts your site into maintenance mode during your updates so you have nothing to worry about. Even if you have the latest version of WordPress installed, you can to re-install if something has gone horribly wrong.
On a related note, it now only takes a couple of clicks to upgrade all of your plugins. Rather than clicking Upgrade for each one, you can do a Bulk upgrade and have them all handled at once. This is a feature I’m sure many have been looking for, especially if you have a good amount of active plugins installed.
Default Theme
Everyone is familiar with the default WordPress theme, Kubrick. It is a hallmark of a new blog. A sign that maybe nobody is home. Definitely not all that pleasing to look at. Kubrick is replaced with 2010 as the default WordPress theme. It was specifically selected because it takes advantage of most of the new features in 3.0 including: custom menus, backgrounds, and headers.
Custom Menus
It used to be a pain to customize your menu. Even if you found a hot theme, you had to be pretty well versed in PHP and HTML to get the menu exactly how you wanted it. Now, you can customize your menu from the WordPress Dashboard. Rather than digging into the PHP/HTML code, you can create the perfect menu for your blog using simple drag-and-drop. Pick which Pages, Categories, and Custom Links you need and order them however you see fit.
Multiuser + WordPress = 3.0
WordPress MU used to be a recipe for confusion. If you wanted to run multiple blogs from the same WordPress install, you were on your own. With WordPress 3.0, this is no longer the case. Run 1 or a network of 10 million sites, all from the same installation. This is a feature that many have dreamed about.
There are a few other features in this release, including: Custom Post Types, API enhancements, and Shortlink Support using your service of choice. This release has so many updates packed into it that the next release isn’t even being touched on yet. The next coding cycle won’t be focused on coding WordPress directly, but on enriching the ecosystem that has evolved around WordPress.
Have you upgraded yet?