WordPress 3.0 is the thirteenth major release of this popular blogging software. The set of features introduced in this release have a significant impact on people who use WordPress as a Content Management System (CMS).

Here is the list of features that have been introduced in the 3.0 release

Custom Post Types

Prior to the release 3.0, the WordPress allowed you to publish two types of content by default: “Posts” and “Pages.” With the release of version 3.0, you can now define additional content types with their own attributes. For instance, if you’re running a WordPress site for a design agency, you may create a custom post type for displaying employee pages, another for portfolio items, and another for client testimonials. You may then customize your theme to better suit each individual post type.

Menu Management

Menu management offers you a complete control over your website’s navigation menus.  Offering easy drag and drop interface, it enables you to create menus that include any mixture of links to internal pages, external URLs, categories and any other field. You can then embed these custom menus as a widget wherever your theme allows.
Changing the order, titles, and destination of links is also an easy task with menu management in WordPress 3.0.

Custom Taxonomies

Custom taxonomies brings WordPress 3.0 closer to a true CMS. This feature enables you to create additional pieces of meta information.  For instance, if you have a real estate website, you might use additional categorizations to provide a list of specifications on each property like asking price, number of bedrooms, year built, etc in addition to photos and descriptions.

New Default Theme: “Twentyten”

Twentyten features a clean, yet bold design. It offers two features that are particularly useful if you’re new to WordPress and don’t have the coding skills to customize your theme.  These two features are:

Custom Header Image

This feature gives you the ability to easily change your site’s header image. Comprising eight interesting banner images to choose from, it also allows you to upload your own image.

Custom Background Image

This feature offers you the ability to upload your own background image for your site.  You can also set a solid background color if you want.  This feature is useful for those who don’t want to get their hands dirty and edit CSS.

Multi-site

With Multi-site, you can manage several different websites (with different domains and/or sub-domains) all with a single installation of WordPress.  What was previously known as WordPress MU (Multi-User) is now merged with the core WordPress system in 3.0.

Here are a few of the minor feature enhancements arriving in WordPress 3.0:

Get Shortlink (with your own domain)
This feature allows you to get a shortlink for your post based on your own domain name.

Author Templates
This feature is helpful for those who run multi-author blog and like to apply unique styles or layouts to individual author pages.

Select Username and Password During Installation

This feature allows you to define username and password during installation, saving you the hassle of changing them later.  It also adds a newlayer of security to your website.

If you are one of those who is looking to install WordPress in a hassle free manner, LimeDomains allows you to set up your WordPress application with just a single click.

Whether you are looking for a free blogging platform, a free image editor, a free word processor, a free sound editor, media player, file archiver, PDF creator or any other software, you can easily make use of free open source applications for all your tasks. Free and easy to install, these applications will enable you undertake all your tasks in a convenient manner.

Here is a list 10 most popular open source software:

WordPress

WordPress is one of the most popular blogging platforms that is used by more than 202 million websites. WordPress offers numerous plug-ins, themes and templates that help you customize your blog as per your requirements within no time. Also, WordPress includes SEO optimization tools for Google and other popular search engines, making it a perfect blogging solution for your website.

Mozilla Firefox

Free and open source web browser, Mozilla Firefox is a faster, more secure, and fully customizable way to surf the web. Mozilla offers a wide array of third party add-ons to its users which let them tailor their browsing environment down to the finest detail. This is the reason why nearly 24.43% of people make use of Mozilla.

FileZilla

FileZilla is a free, open source, cross-platform FTP client that supports FTP, SFTP, and FTPS. As on 5 March 2009, Filezilla was adjudged as the 5th most popular download software of all times by SourceForge.net.

Mozilla Thunderbird

Offering speedy searches, built-in RSS feeds, advanced filtering tools, and excellent add-ons, Mozilla Thunderbird is one of the best, free email applications available. Its excellent features like new Mail Account Setup Wizard, improved Gmail integration, improved address book and others offer excellent user experience.

GnuCash

It provides an excellent, free alternative to paid-for accounting software. Designed for personal and small businesses, GnuCash enables you to keep track of your bank account, stock, and income and expense in addition to just double-entry accounting.

Open Office

Offering the ability to create text documents, spreadsheets, presentations and databases, Open Office can truly be described as a proficient rival to Microsoft Office., It is  which clearly influenced by Open Office’s design and thus . Microsoft Office users will feel completely at home if they make use of and find that Open Office.
performs just as well, if not better.

Notepad++

Notepad++ is a reliable, customizable, and free Windows-based CSS editor. It offers everything: syntax highlighting; folding and auto-completion for CSS, C, C++, C#, Java, JavaScript, SQL, HTML, XML and PHP; multi-file viewing; tabbed editing; zoom in/out; and bookmarks.

Audacity

Audacity is a free, cross-platform sound editor. It can be used record and edit live audio; cut, copy, splice and mix sounds; and convert ageing tapes and records into digital format.

GIMP

GIMP is a free alternative to expensive image editing software. It is capable of performing of all the operation just like any other expensive software except for, vitally, CMYK separation functionality necessary for prepress work.

Handbrake

It helps in converting DVDs to MPEG-4 for playing back on your iPod or archiving. It doesn’t have the ability to decode DVDs, but can do so if you have VLC, which includes a DVD encoder, installed on your computer.

Pidgin

Pidgin is the ultimate, free instant messaging tool. It provides you with one window through which you can simultaneously interact with different people.

Hope these software will  help you in accomplishing instantly and efficiently. Please share your feedback and suggestions with us.

Content Management System manages an organization’s unstructured information. It is used for storing, controlling, revising, and publishing documents, keeping in mind all its diversity of format and location.

We have listed here some Free and popular content management systems in no particular order:

WordPress

It is the most popular CMS for bloggers. It can be set up in minutes and thus allows the users to start blogging and sharing their thoughts with the people all across the globe in just a single click. WordPress possesses an excellent documentation and super-quick installation wizard. It also offers a WYSIWYG editor for those who are not familiar with HTML or other markup language. It also comes with built-in image and multimedia uploading support.

Joomla

Joomla is an award-winning content management system that allows users to create powerful easily and quickly. Its WYSIWYG editor allows you to combine text, images in an attractive way. Also, uploading content is fast and easy. Easy to install, simple to manage, and reliable, Joomla is simple for even non-technical users to add or edit content, update images, and to manage critical data.

Drupal

An open source content management platform, Drupal allows its users to publish, manage and organize a wide variety of content on a website easily and quickly. Drupal supports a variety of websites ranging from personal weblogs to large community-driven websites. It also offers wide variety of modules like picture galleries, forums, file uploads and downloads, user blogs, OpenID, profiles and more to help users add lots of interesting features to their site.

ExpressionEngine

It is one of the fastest, flexible and feature rich content management systems that enables individuals, organizations, and companies to manage their websites in an easy and hassle free manner. With Expression Engine, you can run multiple sites on one single installation. For instance, you can run blogs, community forums, wiki, contact forms, search engine and more. It possesses a templating engine that offers custom global variables, custom SQL queries and a built in versioning system that are extremely useful for the designers.

Alfresco

Alfresco is an open source content management system that offers some really nice features like multilingual management, web site templating and branching, shared drive interface, staging and virtualization, content management and more to help users organize their content easily and effectively.

Concrete5

Concrete5 is a solid content management system that enables users to edit site content directly from the page. It has a very robust administration panel with a built-in system for gathering statistics so you don’t need to install a plugin/extension or use a third party application like Google Analytics to monitor your site traffic.

TextPattern

TextPattern helps you in simplifying the production of well-structured, standards-compliant web pages. It helps you generate extremely light-weight and fast loading pages. It also offers textile markup in the text areas to create HTML elements within the pages. The features of TextPattern include quick search for old articles by keyword, browser-based template, up-to-the-minute visitor/referrer logs, CSS editing, and many more.

TYPO3 CMS

This Content Management system allows content editors to produce and maintain web pages. It offers features like rich text editor, configurable UI levels, spell checker, multiple page editing, internal shortcuts, “live” search & replace, task center, internal search engine and others.

MODx

It is a fast Ajax and SEO content management system allows any individual to manage content on their websites simply, quickly and intuitively. It helps users in taking control of their online content. MODx also reduces your SEO efforts by making it easier to adjust meta-content of your site on a per-page basis.

CushyCMS

This content management system is specially designed for content editors and designers. It allows you to safely edit content of your web pages. Its excellent features help you create standards compliant and search engine friendly content. It also enables you to check editable areas of your pages with a few CSS classes and it also provide FTP details to successfully complete your webs pages.

Radiant CMS

This open source content management system is designed specifically for small businesses. Featuring an elegant user interface, Radiant CMS offers flexible templating with layouts, page parts, snippets and a custom tagging language. It also has a special macro language (similar to HTML) called Radius which makes it easy to include content from other pages, iterate over page children, and display content conditionally.

We hope these content management systems will help you in creating, or re-creating your web presence instantly. LimeDomains enables its users to install applications like Wordpress, Drupal and Joomla in just a single click.

In our on going series of WordPress blogs, we have talked about 10 Popular WordPress Plug-ins, 20 Popular Search Engine Optimization plug-ins for WordPress, and 10 Newest WordPress Themes for Your Blog. This time we will update you about the steps required for setting-up a WordPress blog with LimeDomains.

Setting up a WordPress blog with LimeDomains is extremely easy and hassle free. All you have to do is register yourself on LimeDomains and make use of our one-click installation process to set up your blog.

Here are a few steps on how to set up you blog with us :

Step 1: In the ‘Hosting Management’ section, click on ‘Install an Application’. Following screen will be displayed:

Select WordPress from the menu and then click on ‘Install Now’ and the following page would be displayed:

Step 2: Enter the exact URL in the ‘Installation Path’ at which you want to access your application. Under ‘Show Advanced Details, you get a list of pre filled fields which you can customize as per your requirements. You can either ‘Finish’ or ‘Customize’ your application. If you click on ‘Customize’, you will get a list of themes and plug-ins to choose from.

Step 3: Once you click on ‘Finish’ the following page would be displayed. It is recommended to save your account details and change your admin password to maintain privacy of your account. After successfully installing the application, the following page would be displayed.

Now click on ‘Administrative Interface’ link “to login to your WordPress dashboard. Enter the username and the admin generated password.

That’s all, you’re done! Your WordPress blog is successfully created on LimeDomains now. Get started with blogging today and share your thoughts with global audiences.