WordPress 3.0 Released with New Features

Today WordPress officially released version 3.0. It is the 13th major release of the widely used and very popular blogging platform and content management system.

After struggling to get the new release updated for about thirty minutes and thinking that I may have a big time problem with my blog I learned a valuable lesson when updating to the version 3.0. This lesson is before running an automatic update deactivate all of your plugins.  With my plugins active I was constantly getting a dreaded and frustrating FATAL ERROR MESSAGE. After I deactivated all the plugins it updated without any problems.

First of all before doing ANYTHING back up your database. Something I recently started doing after my blog was hacked and I lost everything I had done for almost 4 months. I currently have the Wrodpress Database Backup running and it backs my database up once a day and send it to me via email. I highly recommend this plugin.

After getting updated to 3.0 you can reactivate all of your plugins that you may have.

After getting WordPress up and running I found that it seemed faster.

The following is a video tour showing off some of the highlights of the new WordPress 3.0.

These are a few of the main new features that I like:

• The new deafualt “2010″ theme. it is a sight for sore eyes after seeing the archaic old one for so long.
• The ability to edit header and background with ease.
• A shortlink button for shortening html links for use in Twitter, etc.

What are your first impressions of the WP 3.0?