Posted on June 23rd, 2010WordPress is an open source CMS (content management system), customarily used as a blog publishing application powered by MySQL and PHP. WordPress 3.0, named as ‘Thelonious’, is the thirteenth major enhancement and bug-fix release of WordPress. What that makes WordPress3 noteworthy are:
1. New Default Theme!
WordPress 3.0 comes with a new default theme, the”Twenty Ten”. From this year on, its goal is to have a new theme for every year.
2. Choose your Username and Password
In earlier versions, when you first install WordPress, you are assigned a default username of ‘admin’, and a randomly generated password. Now WordPress lets you choose your own username and password while installing.
3. Merge of WordPress MU + WordPress.org
WordPress and WordPress MU (Multi User) have merged their codebases. Now WordPress MU users can use WordPress.org plugins without hacking them. This feature allows WordPress users to manage multiple sites (called Multisite) from one WordPress installation.
4. Custom Post Types
This enables users to have varied types of posts. Using this, users can create new post types to show up. Custom Post Type UI is a plugin that provides an easy to use interface. It helps custom post types and taxonomies to be created and administered in WordPress.
5. Easy Menu Management
WordPress 3.0 enables creation of custom menus combining posts, pages, categories, tags, and links for use in theme menus or widgets. The menu feature comes embedded with a default widget that can be added to any widget ready area.
6. Custom Taxonomies
In WordPress, there are two built-in taxonomies, categories and tags. The custom taxonomies function empowers the web designers with some powerful tools for building good information architecture. The capacity of WordPress 3 to combine Post Types and Taxonomies will make WordPress a much more robust CMS option.
7. Custom Background Support
The custom background support can be called by adding a line in your functions.php file. This will let the user upload any custom background image to replace the default grey background.
8. Welcome Guide in Every Installation
The previous WordPress releases always lacked something crucial, a welcome guide that would get users familiar to working with WordPress. The complaints raised by users in this direction have prompted WordPress 3.0 to include a Welcome guide.
9. Canonical Plugins
It is common that a plug-in that you loved being unavailable as the author discontinued providing support. Here we have community developed plug-ins, so that even if one person steps down, the plug-in remains alive.
10. Author Specific Templates
WordPress 3.0enables you to create specific templates for each author. The function get_author_template(); has been expanded in wp-includes/theme.php to do the same.