WordPress 3.0.1 in the Wild

Photo by Crazy Creatures

After approximately 11 million downloads in the first 42 days of WordPress 3, the first point release is now out and available. The update addresses some 55 bugs that were introduced in the new version. These issues were pretty evenly spread over more than 20 different categories with most of the work focused in four areas: Multisite, Menus, Admin and Themes. For those of us who develop in the Multisite environment, it was exciting to see so much effort in this direction, especially after such a relatively smooth merge with WPMU.

The update does not contain any new features and it is unclear how many new features we will see in the near future. The WordPress team has publicly announced that they will be skipping one cycle of development to focus on bringing the theming and plugin standardization up to the next level. I am thankful that the sometimes breakneck speed of development is going to ease up to focus on quality. I think this will pay off in the long run and give all the peripheral developers a good opportunity to implement the new changes and improving their offerings.

The install appears to alter the database structure so it is important that you make a backup of your database and your install before running the update, but now after updating more than six sites, I haven’t seen a hiccup. The download can be easily updated through the automatic updater or downloaded and manually updated. I see no reason to manually update unless you have significantly customized your installation of WordPress in a non-standard way.

So enjoy the cleaned up WP3 and consider contributing to the WordPress project. There are a myriad of ways to do so. Create a theme. Develop a plugin. And spread the word about this great web platform.