WordPress 3.0 Final has been released and as the engine behind 404 Tech Support, I’m interested in their progress. Dubbed “Thelonious” it’s gone through 3 different release candidate versions so hopefully it’s well-polished now and plugins have had time to update. 3.0 has been worked on for half a year and includes “1,217 bug fixes and feature enhancements”. Big new features that I’m excited about include the merging of WordPress MU and WordPress along with, custom post types, and bulk updates for plugin updates.
WordPress 3.0 is flying off the shelves and you can watch how many people are downloading with the WordPress Download Counter. More importantly, you can read the blog entry that announces WordPress 3.0’s release, the Codex page that chronicles the highlights and new user features. If you want the less pretty interface, you can check out their bug tracking site. You can also watch the cool video that was created to highlight and demonstrate some of these new features.
You can download WordPress from http://wordpress.org/ or update your current installation from within the Dashboard. I plan on updating this evening when I’m back at home and have the rest of my tools on-hand in case something goes haywire. After that, I’d like to look into customizing my theme to include the new menu structure that WP3.0 allows.
One of the more exciting things contained in the announcement post was a paragraph discussing the future of WordPress and I like the plans.
Normally this is where I’d say we’re about to start work on 3.1, but we’re actually not. We’re going to take a release cycle off to focus on all of the things around WordPress. The growth of the community has been breathtaking, including over 10.3 million downloads of version 2.9, but so much of our effort has been focused on the core software it hasn’t left much time for anything else. Over the next three months we’re going to split into ninja/pirate teams focused on different areas of the around-WordPress experience, including the showcase, Codex, forums, profiles, update and compatibility APIs, theme directory, plugin directory, mailing lists, core plugins, wordcamp.org… the possibilities are endless. The goal of the teams isn’t going to be to make things perfect all at once, just better than they are today. We think this investment of time will give us a much stronger infrastructure to grow WordPress.org for the many tens of millions of users that will join us during the 3.X release cycle.
I couldn’t agree more that the peripherals of the WordPress community need work. Support has been a little lacking but I’ve been able to get through since it’s open source. If the changes that are implemented in the next few months can improve things as much as the core code has been polished, WordPress will continue to grow.
Have you updated? Which of the new features excite you the most? Do you use a different CMS?