• WordPress and WordPress MU have merged, allowing the management of multiple sites (called Multisite) from one WordPress installation.
• New default theme “Twenty Ten” takes full advantage of the current features of WordPress.
• New custom menu management feature, allows creation of custom menus combining posts, pages, categories, tags, and links for use in theme menus or widgets.
• Custom header and background APIs.
• Contextual help text accessed under the Help tab of every screen in the WordPress administration.
• Ability to set the admin username and password during installation.
• Bulk updating of themes with an automatic maintenance mode during the process.
• Support for shortlinks.
• Improved Custom post types and custom taxonomies including hierarchical (category-style) support. (Try the Custom Post Type UI or GD Custom Posts And Taxonomies Tools plugins to see the possibilities.)
• A lighter admin color scheme to increase accessibility and put the focus more squarely on your content.

You can go to this page to read the whole long list of all the new additions to 3.0 or you can just watch this video for the highlights:

You should see the upgrade link appear in your WP admin soon or you can download it here if you want to install manually. As always, if you’re a Swank Web Hosting client and you need help with your upgrade, please contact us!

If you haven’t upgraded yet, here are some of the new features you’ll have when you do:

• Built-in image editor that lets you crop, edit, rotate and scale your images.
• Global “trashcan”, which means that posts or comments you delete won’t immediately go away into the ether. So you can restore anything you deleted by accident.
• Easier video embedding.
• Easily assign thumbnails for all your posts, which are great for magazine style blogs and food blogs. (You can see an example of how I used the new Post Thumbnail feature on Cooking with Michele. The thumbnails are being utilized for the “related posts” under every post, as well as on the archives, categories and search pages.) Here’s a great tutorial if you want to know how to set up Post Thumbnails on your site.
• Automatic database optimization, which is an important thing to do to keep your WP install running well, but most people who aren’t designers/developers wouldn’t have any clue how to do themselves. Now all you have to do is add this your wp-config file:
  define('WP_ALLOW_REPAIR', true);

That’s just some of the big stuff, there are tons of small improvements and bug fixes. You can read a longer list over on the Dev Blog. Or you can watch this video for the highlights:

I’ve noticed some confusion among users at other sites, so I want to make this clear. If you have the current version of WP, which is 2.8.4, you are safe, your blog is immune from this worm. If you have an older version, especially a much older version, you need to upgrade ASAP. Also, this only applies to self-hosted WP blogs. Blogs on wordpress.com aren’t affected because they are always current.

Matt goes into specifics about this worm and the importance of upgrading over on the dev blog and I encourage you to go read it.

If you have version 2.7 or above you should be able to upgrade automatically. It’s extremely simple. In your WP admin, just click on Tools>Upgrade and click on the button that says “Upgrade Automatically”. It takes about 10 seconds and you’re done. I’ve upgraded hundreds of blogs this way and have never had any problems. (Note: this doesn’t mean you shouldn’t make a backup beforehand, you should be making regular backups of your blog anyway!)

The only thing that might be an issue as far as the automatic upgrades is if you are using either of the default WP themes. Those WILL get overwritten. The best way to guard this from happening is to rename your theme. You can follow the simple instructions here. As long as you aren’t using the default theme, though, your theme will NEVER be touched in an automatic upgrade.

If you have an older version of WP that doesn’t have automatic upgrades or your host doesn’t support that feature or you’d just feel safer doing it yourself, it’s still very easy to upgrade WordPress. I wrote a tutorial about upgrading WP a few years ago and the instructions still apply today.

Whether you spend the 10 seconds upgrading your blog automatically or the 5 minutes to upgrade manually, it’s extremely important that you always upgrade when a new version comes out. The new version is always the best, most secure version to have. And if the developers at WP find a new problem they will keep putting out new versions until that problem has been fixed (this is especially true since the automatic upgrades have been introduced). If you don’t upgrade you are opening yourself up to being taken advantage of by people that want to exploit these problems that the developers work so hard to fix.

So what do you do if you’ve already been hacked? Here are several helpful posts with instructions to fix it:

• WordPress Permalink and RSS Problems
• WordPress Blog Permalinks Hacked By “ElijahHastings65″!

I also wrote several posts about how to clean up a hacked WP blog and prevent it from happening again:

• Fixed a hacked site and prevent it from happening again – Part 1
• Web 101: Fixed a hacked site and prevent it from happening again – Part 2

And if your blog is just totally, irrevocably screwed up (which has not been my experience with this particular hack, I’ve fixed 3 blogs already just using the first link above), here’s a good tutorial for getting a copy of your content and starting fresh:

• How To Completely Clean Your Hacked WordPress Installation

And just a reminder to Swank Web Hosting customers: Upgrades are free! I encourage you to use the automatic upgrade feature, but if you have a really old version of WP or you aren’t sure about upgrading yourself, please contact us and we’ll get you set up with the current version of WP.

Related posts:

• WordPress 2.7.1 Released
• WordPress 2.6.1
• WordPress 2.8.2 – Security Update
• WordPress 2.5 has been released!
• WordPress 2.5.1

WordPress 2.8.2 fixes an XSS vulnerability. Comment author URLs were not fully sanitized when displayed in the admin. This could be exploited to redirect you away from the admin to another site. Download 2.8.2 or automatically upgrade from the Tools->Upgrade page of your blog’s admin.

Related posts:

• WordPress 2.8.1 is out
• WordPress 2.6.1
• Have you upgraded yet?
• Availability Update
• WordPress 2.5.1

• Certain themes were calling get_categories() in such a way that it would fail in 2.8. 2.8.1 works around this so these themes won’t have to change.
• Dashboard memory usage is reduced. Some people were running out of memory when loading the dashboard, resulting in an incomplete page.
• The automatic upgrade no longer accidentally deletes files when cleaning up from a failed upgrade.
• A problem where the rich text editor wasn’t being loaded due to compression issues has been worked around.
• Extra security has been put in place to better protect you from plugins that do not do explicit permission checks.
• Autosave error experienced by some IE users is fixed.

You find a list of all big fixes on the WP Dev Blog. I’m not seeing a notification yet in any of my WP sites, but I’m sure the notice will show up in the next few hours or you can get the download here if you want to update your site manually.

• Optimizing scripts and styles to make WP faster.
• Adding a theme directory, similar to the already built-in plugin directory, so you can search for and install new themes right from your admin.
• Redoing the widget system for easier use and customization.
• Improvements to the screen options (the tab in the top right-hand corner of the admin). Having a big monitor, I especially like being able to choose 3 or 4 columns on my dashboard. You can also now choose how many entries to display on the Edit Post/Page screens. Check out the tab on any page in the admin and see what options you have, in a lot of places you can get rid of things you don’t use so the admin is less cluttered.
• Improvements to custom taxonomies, which you can read more about in detail here.
• Improvements to the theme editor like syntax highlighting and numbering (you probably don’t care about this unless you are a developer).

Go here to see the full, very long list of improvements in 2.8.

Hopefully, you already have 2.7 in which case you’ll be able to upgrade to 2.8 in seconds with the click of the Upgrade button, but you can still download it here and install the old fashioned way. If you are a Swank Web Hosting customer and still have WP 2.7 or less feel free to contact us for a free upgrade, we’ve noticed an uptick of site hacking lately, especially on WP blogs with version 2.5 or lower.

The upgrade feature may not work for everyone depending on your host, but it should work for most major hosts. You can check to see if your host is on the list here. The upgrade feature works for all Swank Web Hosting clients, but feel free to contact us if you need help or if you haven’t upgraded to 2.7 yet and would like to. All Swank Web Hosting clients get free WP upgrades!

Related posts:

• What to expect in WP 2.6
• Try out WordPress 2.5 before it’s released
• WordPress 2.5 RC1 available
• Firefox 3 Released!
• WordPress 2.3.1 released

Best Canadian Blog:
Attack of the Redneck Mommy
Cheaty Monkey

Best Art, Craft or Design Blog:
Craftastrophe (co-founded by one of our own, Karen)

Best Teen Blog:
Sarcastica

Best Kept Secret Blog:
Chickens in the Road

Congratulations to all the finalists! Go vote for your favs today. Voting closes on February 2 and winners are announced in March.

Related posts:

• WordPress 2.8 “Baker” Released
• WordPress 2.9 “Carmen” is out!
• WordPress 2.8.2 – Security Update
• Secure your WordPress Blog. Upgrade Now!
• WordPress 2.7.1 Released

Over 150 people contributed code directly to the release, our highest ever, with many tens of thousands more participating in the polls, surveys, tests, mailing lists, and other feedback mechanisms the WordPress dev team used in putting this release together.

The biggest difference in 2.7 is the new admin interface.  Yes, another new admin interface.  But this one seems to be here to stay (Matt says we should expect it to still basically be the same a year from now).  It was developed with the user in mind to make the area simple to navigate and with as few clicks as possible.  The dashboard and the Post pages are also almost completely customizable giving you the ability to drag and drop boxes wherever you want or removing them altogether.  Also, don’t forget to check “Your Profile” under Users as the 2.5 color scheme feature is still there and personally, I think the blue color scheme is much nicer than the default gray one.

Perhaps the best new feature in 2.7 is finally the ability to perform one-click upgrades directly from the admin area.  No more manual upgrades!  No more having to pay your designer to do your upgrades (believe me we don’t mind!).  Related to this is the new plugin interface which lets you search for and install new plugins from the plugins database directly inside your admin area.  With the plugins database integrated the themes database can’t be that far behind!

Also new is the Comments and Post/Page management interfaces.  You can reply to comments directly for the admin now.  If you need to edit a category or a tag on a post, you no longer need to open the whole post up, just use the quick edit link to change those things directly from the post management page.

For comments, they have also added new features like threaded comments and paged comments.  However, these features will need to be added to your current template, they won’t work unless you have a 2.7 compatible theme.  If you need help making your theme 2.7 compatible (or even 2.5 compatible since many themes still don’t support gravatars) feel free to contact us and we can get you set up with all these snazzy new features.

So what are you waiting for?  Upgrade your blog today!  We can help if you need it, and just think, next time you’ll be able to upgrade with a the click of a button!  This is not one of those releases where you need to wait around and see if anything goes wrong.  As I mentioned above, there have been several betas and release candidates, plus it already went live on WordPress.com, so millions of people are already using it.  This is a very strong release with features that you don’t want to miss out on.

Here’s a nice visual introduction video:

Here are some resources to check out plugin/theme compatibility as well as upgrading your theme to use new 2.7 features:

• 2.7 Plugin Compatibility
• 2.7 Theme Compatibility
• Migrating your Plugins and Themes to 2.7
• How to Create a 2.7 Compatible Comments.php

Download it now!

Op111.net has a great list of eleven new features in 2.7 including mass editing of posts and pages, being able to reply to comments from the admin, threaded and paginated comments and much more.

2.7 was initially scheduled for a November 10th release, but they’ve pushed that back a couple of weeks for some extra time to perfect the release.  There will be a release candidate coming out on the 10th and it will “be a high-quality, almost-finished release that we are comfortable recommending for broad use”.  Then they will use the next few weeks to fix bugs that early adopters report before putting out the final release.

Until then, you can download the beta version and see what we have to look forward to.  If you do try out the beta don’t forget to take these polls from the developers and let them know about your favorite features.

Related posts:

• What to expect in WP 2.6
• Try out WordPress 2.5 before it’s released
• WordPress 2.5 RC1 available