Following six months of hard work by the many volunteers who work on the platform, WordPress version 3.0. (aka Thelonious”) is now available for download or upgrade through the dashboard if you’re already a WordPress user. WordPress is one of the most popular blogging applications and with the new release, the open source community has added many more content-management tools.
One of the biggest changes in the upgrade is multisite capability which will allow users to use a single WordPress installation over multiple web sites. Users can enable multisite capabilities by a manual edit of the wp-config.php file and it is restricted to providing site addresses to the main domain of the site on which WordPress 3 is installed. Users must choose between using subdomains or subdirectories, which means each additional site in your network will be created as a new virtual subdomain or subdirectory and you cannot change this unless you reconfigure your install.
- Subdomains — like site1.example.com and site2.example.com
- Subdirectories — like example.com/site1 and example.com/site2
New Default Theme Design
The upgrade also features a new, community developed default theme called Twenty Ten. Up to Version 2.9.2, the default theme was the Kubrick theme, the Twenty Ten theme is now the only theme in the WordPress distribution. Twenty Ten is designed to showcase some of the new theme-based features. Theme designers and developers have new APIs that allow them to implement custom backgrounds, headers, short links, menus (without file editing), post types and taxonomies.
Other new features include the big time-saving ability to upgrade multiple plugins at one time and a new Custom Post Type. According to the WordPress Codex Help, “Custom post types allow users to easily create and manage such things as portfolios, projects, video libraries, podcasts, quotes, chats, and whatever a user or developer can imagine.”
WordPress users have you upgraded to version 3 yet?
Jennifer FarleyJennifer Farley is a designer, illustrator and design instructor based in Ireland. She writes about design and illustration on her blog at Laughing Lion Design.
