It’s finally here. Version 3 of WordPress. There’s more details on exactly what is new at the WordPress Development Blog but I wanted to share what I believe are the highlights.

Custom post types.

Three simple words, but a whole heap of functionality. We’ve already begun development of new sites using WordPress 3 betas but custom post types will really help speed development and more importantly make easier to use and more powerful sites for our clients.

No longer will we be fairly limited with just posts and pages. Anything we can think of could be developed. I’ve already got my eye on a property type. I suspect that quite a few plugins that currently use separate database tables will refactor to use custom post types instead.

Custom menus

Up to now menus on WordPress sites have been limited to either pages, or categories or some complex custom code to create something else. Now we can have an easy to edit menu with anything, pages, links, categories etc. Again helping the most important people, our clients.

With these and everything else that the team and contributers behind WordPress have done as they say, the future is looking quite rosy, it’s going to be an exciting time.

To finish off, I’ve got to mention the WordPress app on the iPhone. Even though I may be in the middle of nowhere being able to write this is brilliant. If you have an iPhone and a WordPress powered site, this free app is a must.

Updated: If you want to view a video tour of WordPress 3 just view it below.