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.

Here’s a short video discussing some of these highlights and an intro to the latest version.

If you have logged into your WordPress admin recently you will notice that at the top of the dashboard the following message “WordPress 3.0 is available! Please update now.”

Remember to completely backup your database and website files before performing an upgrade.

Category: Arboretum, Web Basics, Working with Rhizome