The thirteenth major release of our favourite content management system WordPress 3.0 or “Thelonious” was released last week so we’d thought it might be worth a little mention!

If you’ve been using a self hosted WordPress site I’m sure that you’ve already hit that ‘upgrade’ button to see what it’s all about. For those of you that haven’t here’s a few of the key features……

New default theme

Long overdue some might say but finally the old blue top default has been replaced by “Twentyten”. A nice simple theme but it does come with a couple of handy features such as a custom header and background.

Of course you can upload both your own backgrounds and headers but what is a nice feature is that the headers can change for different pages.

Menus

The new menu managment in Thelonious makes it easier to organise your site’s navigation. There is also the option the use a widget as a navigation tool rather or as well as, your main tool bar.

Be aware the some themes (such as the one we’re using here) might freak out a little so once you upgrade your navigation bar might disappear altogether!

It’s a problem that’s easily fixed but just keep an eye on that one!

Easy Updates

We like it when things are made a little easier! The new updater means that you can update all of your plugins and theme all in one section.

Custom Post Types

You can define additional post types with their own attributes. There are already some plugins that you can use to set these up such as Custom Post Type UI.

Multi Site

One of the biggest new features that allows users multi-site capabilities. This means that you can now manage hundreds of WordPress sites within one installation.

This isn’t really something the average user would take advantage of as it does require a bit of knowledge of code… all the same it’s a nice feature.