The blogosphere has been spending a lot of time lately talking about the upcoming release of WordPress 3.0. It includes many new features like a new default theme, the ability to manage multiple blogs from a single code installation and an easier method of creating custom menus.

I’m personally looking forward to the multi-site ability as I have several different blogs using WordPress. Keeping up with blog and plugin updates on all of them can be a little tiring. I expect it will be a lot of work to set up but worth it in the end.

I’m planning to use the custom post type option to redo my portfolio in a more accessible manner.

The addition I’m not anticipating but I should is the ability to name your administrator account whatever you want. For years the first account created by WordPress was called “admin” by default. Hackers have been taking advantage of it to try to crack WordPress-based websites. There have been tutorials to change the default user name but these have been hacks needing you to make changes directly in the database. Letting people create personal ids at installation makes the site far more secure with no scary hacks needed.

I’m listing some useful tutorials for WordPress 3.0 and others that work for earlier versions too.

• WordPress 3.0: Checking out the New Menu System
• Adding Post Thumbnails To WordPress 3.0
• Using HTML5 elements in WordPress post content
• How To Create “Search By Category” Functionality In WordPress
• How to Add Post Thumbnail to your WordPress RSS Feeds
• 10 Resources To Help You Create A Killer WordPress Options Page
• 25+ Extremely Useful Tricks for the WordPress Functions File