After reading about all the exciting new features and improvements packed into WordPress 3.0, I’ve finally gotten this blog updated to it. Thelonious is one awesome release of WordPress, making this great platform even better!
Upgrading
I ran into a memory limit issue for PHP when I first tried the upgrade automatically, due to the larger size of this new version. This was easily fixed by following this post’s advice. After that I just clicked Upgrade Automatically and what do you know WordPress updated itself properly in no time at all. I then went to the Dashboard and was greeted with the new hotness.
Themes and such
As you can see if you’ve been to this blog before, things look a bit different. This is mostly because it’s so easy and fast to customize many visual aspects in the new version that, well, it’s hard to resist tweaking!
I decided to go with the new theme included in WordPress 3.0: TwentyTen. With a variety of attractive headers, six widget areas, and great looking typography fresh out of the box, this is a much improved default theme. One of my favorite features: when editing in Visual Mode, your post content will appear just like it would in your actual blog! This means no more processes like: make some edits, click save, wait for the save, click preview, check out the preview in a new tab. Just keep working in the same editor and get the real view right away.
You can now also add and edit your blog’s menus without editing any files through the Appearance Menus. The positioning of this through the UI is limited by what your theme supports, but its much easier to customize and get what you actually want into a menu than before.
Plugins
Working with plugins is also made a bit easier in WordPress 3.0. You can update all plugins with updates available in a single step. And you get lots of handy info about the upgrade from a single screen. I mean just look at this:
Awesomesauce. And when you are done, it shows you the status all at once as well, so you know if that big batch of upgrade cookies came out alright or not:
In this and many other areas, the admin interface has been streamlined, making just about everything easier to get to. And the icing on the cake: everything is faster anyway! I didn’t make any other changes to my server, but since the upgrade interacting with everything in the admin interface has been much snappier. Add to that a whopping 1200 bug fixes and this is a great milestone release.
New Flexibility
Another big feature of 3.0 is Custom Post Types. This allows you to register new types aside from just the default Posts, Attachments, Pages, Revisions and Nav Menus. You can define the custom type’s attributes, how to display it, and more. This would be great for more business-oriented blogs, or even simply highly-customized personal sites.
WordPress 3.0 is an incredible update! I highly recommend upgrading to it.
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