Manmohanjit Singh

The latest major update to WordPress was released today with a whole bunch of new features. More than a thousand bugs were squashed, many new features and an updated user interface. All this by 218 different contributors in less than 6 months.

Download it here.

Custom Username And Password

Custom Username And Password

You now have the ability to choose a custom username and password during install. You can use the default username/password by leaving the field blank. You can secure your site even more by using a different username so that others would find it out easily.

Updated User Interface

New WordPress User Interface

The new user interface is way more lighter allowing users to focus more towards the post. Previously the color scheme was black, now it’s a mixture of grey and white. Many icons were updated too. JavaScript files, CSS files and images were optimized to load pages faster. The new color scheme looks way better compared to the older one.

WordPress Networks(a.k.a. WordPress MU)

WordPress Networks

WordPress MU is now available in WordPress 3.0 and is named as Networks. You can now have millions of blogs just under one installation. It requires you to add a few lines of code to your .htaccess file and wp-config.php file.

WordPress Menus

WordPress Menus

If you had been following it’s release, you might noticed that in the second beta of this release, WordPress Menus was introduced. It allows users to add or edit their navigation menus. You can easily choose which pages, categories or even custom links you want to have in any part of your site. You don’t need to edit your theme files anymore.

New Default Theme, Twenty Ten

Twenty Ten WordPress Theme

A new theme replaced the default WordPress theme, it’s called Twenty Ten which is a simple two column theme that allows you to use custom headers, backgrounds and menus. This theme focuses more towards typography. The old Kubrick theme is no more available but you can download it from the WordPress gallery manually. The new Twenty Ten theme takes full advantage of the new features in WordPress 3.0.

Custom Post Types And Custom Post Taxonomies

Custom Post Types

Custom post types and custom taxonomies were also introduced. This definitely will benefit people. It’s helpful especially when you need to display different types of products, add contacts or even to use it for your portfolio.

WordPress Shortlinks

WordPress Shortlinks

Shortlinks allows you to grab a short version of your post’s link. It uses the default ugly permalink structure, so its short. Now with shortlinks, you don’t need to use custom URL shortening services, all you need is one line of code.

Everything Else

The WordPress importer now comes separately, you will need to download it from the WordPress gallery.

Many new hooks were added to the core allowing developers to take advantage of WordPress and extend it even more. Thelonius is the code name for this release, now start exploring all the other cool features and updates.

Download WordPress 3.0 from here.