San Francisco (ip-192.com): WordPress 3.0 is out – should you care? The answer is definitely yes if you are serious about blogging. The latest version of the popular Content Management System (CMS) merges WordPress and WordPress Multi-User (MU), allowing the management of multiple sites from one WordPress installation. The new version supports both subdirectories (ip-192.com/blog) and subdomains (blog/ip-192.com), which requires adding a wildcard subdomain to your DNS record. Multiple domains are also supported via a domain-mapping plug-in (more information is available here).
Bloggers can now create custom menus and combine pages, posts, tags, categories, and links for use in them menus and widgets. An automatic maintenance mode allows to update multiple themes, custom headers and background API's are supported. Since most users will host their blog elsewhere, WP 3 now checks if the required versions of PHP and MySQL are present and notify the blogger if the server does not meet the requirements.
The installation (or update process) itself is straight forward. While WordPress automatically creates an administrator account and a randomly generated password, version 3 encourages users to set their own admin username and password during the installation process to increase security. To enable multiple site support, users need to edit the wp-config.php file and activate a WordPress network. A detailed description of how to do this is available here. Themes and plug-ins for multiple sites can be managed through the "Super-Admin" menu that becomes available after the network is enabled. Unfortunately, there is no global dashboard to configure themes and plug-ins. User need to log into each blog using the "Super-Admin" feature and set each site individually.
For starters, the new default theme for WordPress 3 is Twenty Ten. It features a new lock, improved typography, and more options to customize the site. The WordPress website states that the new version contains 1,217 bug-fixes and feature enhancements. 218 developers contributed to WordPress 3.0.
"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," says WordPress founder and developer Matt Mullenweg on the WordPress Blog. "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."
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