WordPress 3.0 is a pretty significant update which includes the WordPressMU integration, 1,217 bug fixes and several important feature enhancements.   Here is a video with additional information:

Here is what I found while checking my Google Webmaster Tools account for this website:

Duplicate Title Tags

Duplicate Descriptions

Is this a huge deal?  Probably not, but you may want to consider unchecking this box in your Dashboard > Settings > Discussion tab.   Hopefully in a future version of WordPress this will NOT be checked by default and instead be an option.

So, how do you get 2.7? If you installed WordPress using Fantastico then you upgrade by logging into your Fantastico control panel and selecting “upgrade to 2.7″. Its advisable to backup your database first, but don’t let this put you off upgrading – I’ve just upgraded two sites from 2.5.2 and 2.6.2 to 2.7 via Fantastico with no problems at all. Otherwise, head over to WordPress and download the software.

But why should you upgrade in the first place? 2.7′s visual overhaul makes it so much easier to use; you can rearrange your dashboard and have literally everything at your fingertips. You can reply and moderate comments from the dash (even by keyboard shortcuts!), as well as write new posts directly from the dashboard.

Plugins can be installed by installed by searching the WordPress.org plugins database with a single click without leaving your site. How cool is that! You can upload plugins from your computer without unzipping them and WordPress will install them. You can also upgrade your plugins with a single click. Speaking of single click upgrading, your upgrade to 2.7 could well be your last manual upgrade as 2.7 includes a feature that lets you upgrade your WordPress install with a single click.

With WordPress increasingly being used for everything, a useful new feature, Sticky Posts, allows you to keep a post at the top of your blog, even if you have more recent posts. In practice, this means if you’re running a competition or something like that, then you can keep attention directed at your big post.

The shiny new interface extends beyond the dashboad, and the focus is very much on moving everything around to suit you. The screen below shows how you can rearrange your post-writing page.

And for those wondering why 2.7 isn’t 3.0 with all of these great additions, according to Weblog Tools Collection, Matt doesn’t want to skip version numbers anymore.

For the complete lowdown, visit the codex.

Finally, this video from the WordPress team briefly looks through some of the new features

This was a guest post by Alex Denning, who is a WordPress power user, web design freelancer and currently maintains two sites – Nometet.com and GreenGrassGames.com. You can follow him on Twitter here. If you have WordPress knowledge and are interested in writing a post for WordPress Hacks, please contact us.

Over the next couple weeks, I plan on writing a few posts and get a couple discussions going about potential features I’d like to see built into the core WordPress installation.   We’ve talked about this in general a little bit before and many of these features are already available as WordPress plugins, but I feel they are important enough to bloggers that they should be built directly into WordPress.    Doing this also helps minimize the number of plugins used by WordPress.org bloggers, which can in turn minimize security risks or huge drains on system resources which can come from plugins.

This week I’ve decided to talk about the current WordPress search feature.  In its current state, the WordPress search feature is very basic.   You type in your keyword(s) and it will display all posts which contain that keyword in the reverse order of how they were posted (newest posts first).   This obviously does not make it easy for a reader of your blog to find the more relevant posts without a little luck.  The post they are looking for might be 3 pages deep!

As a result, many WordPress users have turned to building a Google Custom Search Engine (GCSE) into their WordPress blog.   This allows Google AdSense ads (it is optional), but much more importantly, it uses Google’s algorithm to display the most relevant posts first, allowing readers to find what they are looking for!

In a future version of WordPress, I’d like to see some attention put into building an improved search feature within WordPress.   Having an improved search algorithm would also be beneficial when searching within the WordPress dashboard as that search works the same way.  When trying to find a post to edit, I sometimes have to flip through several pages looking for it (if it is an older post).

What do you think?  Would you like to see improved search within WordPress?   How high of a priority is it to you?

Beginning with WordPress 2.7, one change is the addition of keyboard shortcuts for moderating comments.  According to the WordPress Codex:

Using Keyboard Shortcuts to Navigate

Navigating comments is accomplished with the j and k keys. When you first visit the Comments page, no comments are selected, so, first press the letter j, or the letter k, to select the first comment. After that, just press the letter j to move the select to the next comment.

• Pressing j moves the current selection (light-blue background) down.
• Pressing k moves the current selection (light-blue background) up.

Note that if you come to the bottom of a page of comments and press j again, you will be taken to the next page and the first comment of that next page will be selected. Likewise, pressing k at the top of a comment page will zoom you to the previous page, selecting the comment at the bottom of that previous page.

Using Keyboard Shortcuts to Perform Actions

For one of these actions to affect a comment, make sure the comment is first selected.

• Pressing a approves the currently selected comment.
• Pressing s marks the current comment as spam.
• Pressing d deletes the current comment.

Note that those first three actions (and most common actions) use the three left-most keys of the home row of a QWERTY keyboard. It is recommended that you shift your hand to the left so that your index finger is on d instead of on f, as is normal.

• Pressing u unapproves the currently selected comment, placing it back into moderation.
• Pressing r initiates an inline reply to the current comment (you can press Esc to cancel the reply).
• Pressing q activates “Quick Edit” which allows for rapid inline editing of the current comment.

Read the official Codex article here.

Well, as always the WordPress team has been hard at work and today I noticed a post over at Ryan Boren’s blog that discusses what features have already been built into WordPress 2.7 (not a complete list, but the highlights):

• New admin UI based on the crazyhorse experimental UI branch with new menus and navigation
• New edit post page that allows dragging and dropping of meta boxes. Boxes can be expanded and collapsed as before and now also completely hidden.
• Ability to hide columns on the content index pages
• Inline editing of posts and pages on the content index pages
• Comments XMLRPC API (Who wants comment moderation on the iPhone? Me.)
• Reply to comments from the admin
• Keyboard hot keys for managing comments
• Threaded Comments and new wp_list_comments() API
• Sticky Posts
• Automatic plugin install and integrated plugin browser
• Automatic upgrade of WordPress
• HTTPOnly auth cookies
• New HTTP request API
• A new SSH2 filesystem abstraction for updates and installs over sftp

Some of my personal favorite items were bolded by me.   Ryan also notes that they are hoping to have theme update, install, and browsing available by the time WordPress 2.7 comes out.

What feature are you most looking forward to?

According to Matt, WordPress is has continued to show steady growth.    Here are the statistics he gave for WordPress.com:

• Page views grew from 1.5 billion to 6.5 billion/month
• 1/3 of the page views come from VIPs like CNN and LOLCats
• 120-160 million global unique visitors per month
• Two million new blogs created for the year
• 35 million new blog posts (up from 20 million)

As for WordPress.org users (which makes up most of this sites readers), it looks like there are 2.6 million active user-installed WordPress blogs.  These stats are based off of real data, so they should be pretty accurate.

Matt also commented on the future of WordPress, and their focus on building WordPress into a self-updating system.   This new process will be a one-click upgrade and will generate a list of incompatible WordPress plugins or WordPress themes (which will be made possible via the WordPress theme directory and plugin directory) and make upgrading a snap.

Overall, I’m very excited about the future of WordPress and think they are taking the right steps to continue growing and improving the software.  I think as long as they continue to integrate more of the most popular plugins into the core installation and add additional CMS functionality, WordPress will continue to grow in popularity.

A couple newly discovered WordPress 2.6 features:

• WordPress Auto-Upgrade
• Plugin Auto-Installation
• Theme preview

It is GREAT to see the WordPress auto-upgrade feature being built into the base WordPress install, and the other two are very useful features.  Click over to check out the other new features and descriptions for each.   Great work John!