I have to admit I held off upgrading to the various Beta and RC versions which have been available for the last few weeks – I was lazy, I admit – but as a result of that I am even more impressed now that the alpha WordPress 3.0 is out and available for automatic upgrade.

Wow. The admin screen looks awesome! I am still exploring to see what all has been made available to us but here are some stuff I have been anticipating/have seen written on the official WordPress blog.

* Custom post types. I have been anticipating this for a while now. With 3.0 you can now declare custom post types and have them appear separately in the left hand admin menu under “Posts”. So, you can have news posts, music posts, recipe posts etc all as explicitly declared separate entities. Here is a blog post that explains custom posts and what you can do with them in more detail.

* Custom taxonomies – similarly to the custom posts described above, you can now create explicit custom taxonomies! Why is this useful? Say you run a recipe site and you want to treat recipe ingredients as tags. You no longer have to mix ingredients with say difficulty level under the same Tags veil. Instead, create an “Ingredients” taxonomy and a “Difficulty” taxonomy and enter the respective data to each. Here is a link if you want to learn more about custom taxonomies.

* WordPress single and Multi user has finally been merged! You can now run a single blog or millions of blogs all from the same administration panel!

Other stuff that is new with 3.0:

“Theme developers have new APIs that allow them to easily implement custom backgrounds, headers, shortlinks, menus”

new lighter interface, the contextual help on every screen, the 1,217 bug fixes and feature enhancements, bulk updates so you can upgrade 15 plugins at once with a single click

Here is an official list of all the new stuff that is in 3.0.

Finally, if you wish to watch a video outlining all the changes, here it is: