The Website of UX Designer Matthew Stephens

Mashable has put together a great list of the best features. Here is a quick summary:

1. Custom Post Types – Finally, I can update my portfolio without hacking WordPress. This will be huge for people who manage content within pages.
2. Menu Management – My favorite feature of 3.0, since I am constantly using widgets to hack sites’ menu navs.
3. Custom Taxonomies – This feature makes WordPress much more of a “genuine” CMS. Great for tracking fields of data.
4. New Default Theme – Finally, a good theme that doesn’t need to be immediately replaced on fresh installs.
5. Multi-site Support - This will be great for my corporate clients running WordPress who want to allow one editor to maintain many sites at once. Very convenient.
6. URL Shortener – So long bit.ly.
7. No more automatic password generation – That was so annoying.

Check out the original post - WordPress 3.0: The 5 Most Important New Features.

http://www.tripwiremagazine.com/2010/02/16-interesting-wordpress-plugins-to-maximize-traffic-and-followers-from-social-networks.html

As a designer who runs a blog, I can tell you how important social media is for your posts. I haven’t implemented any of these plugins yet, but I plan on doing it very soon. The one that really caught my eye was the Facebook Connect WordPress Plugin. I plan on really playing with this alot, because one of the things that always bugged me about WordPress was the fact that you had to create an account in order to comment. If we all used the Facebook Connect feature, we could easily comment on WordPress blogs without the hassle of account creation.

http://www.webdesignerwall.com/tutorials/new-wordpress-theme-notepad/

“I’m back into the WordPress themedesign. Check out my latest release — theNotepad theme. Inspired by the iPhone’s Notes app, Notepad is a modern theme with a subtle touch of the sketchy and texturized background. The theme is widget compatible with threaded & paged comments, social media buttons, and multi-level dropdown menus. It has been tested on WordPress 2.9 with Firefox, Chrome, Safari, and IE7+. Users with CSS3 compatible browser will see the nice visual enhancement such as drop shadow and rounded corners. Check out the demo site and share your comments.”