Upgrading to WordPress 3.0 ‘Thelonius’
by James McGrath
Last week WordPress released ‘Thelonius’ or WordPress 3.0, the latest version of their popular CMS.
There are a number of new features and upgrades in this version of WordPress that make this blogging platform even more powerful and usable that previous versions.
Here are the highlights:
- WordPress and WordPress MU have merged, allowing the management of multiple sites (called Multisite) from one WordPress installation.
- New default theme “Twenty Ten” takes full advantage of the current features of WordPress.
- New custom menu management feature, allows creation of custom menus combining posts, pages, categories, tags, and links for use in theme menus or widgets.
- Custom header and background APIs.
- Contextual help text accessed under the Help tab of every screen in the WordPress administration.
- Ability to set the admin username and password during installation.
- Bulk updating of themes with an automatic maintenance mode during the process.
- Support for shortlinks.
- Improved Custom post types and custom taxonomies including hierarchical (category-style) support. (Try the Custom Post Type UI or GD Custom Posts And Taxonomies Tools plugins to see the possibilities.)
- A lighter admin color scheme to increase accessibility and put the focus more squarely on your content.