The Outserve Limited Blog

The much anticipated major version upgrade of WordPress, the ever popular blogging and Content Management System, has been released today.

A lot of emphasis of this release, version 3.0, has been put on the inclusion of WordPress MU (Multi User). Although hosting multiple blogs on one install is incredibly useful this will probably be a feature not used by many average WordPress users, but there are lots of other great new features that are mentioned in the video above including:

1. Set admin user name on installation – a small  but very useful feature that will go some way to make your WordPress install more  secure. Whether opportunists or brute force bots not having a  user called ‘admin’ requires additional guessing and may mean simple hacks are just not effective.
2. Upgrading improvments – All upgrades (e.g. WordPress install, themes and plugins) can be dealt with in one area but best of all plugins can be updated in bulk, a feature that you will probably need straight after your 3.0 upgrade as many plugins have been upgraded to be 3.0 compatible.
3. Help on every screen – context sensitive help on every page including useful links
4. Kubrick replaced as the default theme – replaced with “Twenty Ten” a theme that makes the most of the new features – as much as I have enjoyed using the Kubrick theme I do not think that I will miss the, now, over used theme and look forward to utilising all of WordPress’s new features.
5. Create custom menus and put in any widget area – This functionality has been donated from Woothemes and is the code from their Custom Navigation.
6. Shortlink support using wp.me – while lacking the statistics of bit.ly it is still a welcome feature to have url shortening in the WordPress editor.
7. WordPressMU (Multi User) now part of standard WordPress install. Whether a whole university campus or just your close friends and family you can now manage multiple blogs with one install, all as part of standard WordPress.

Again, in our opinion, a strong release making one of the best blogging/CMS software packages even better.