Some of the new features include:

New Link Shortener

WordPress 3.0 offers better micro-blogging (e.g. Twitter) integration with its new feature called Shortlink, which gives you the ability to generate branded short links (in a similar way as is.gd or bit.ly) for sharing your posts and pages in social media.

New Easy Navigation Menu Management

The exciting menu management feature is one of the most anticipated and demanded features of WordPress end-users.

This new feature will make it easy as pie for users to add new navigation menus in their WordPress-powered blogs and websites.

You will need no coding experience to modify your WordPress navigation: Just drag and drop menu items, and that’s it.

You can add outgoing links, categories and pages in one single menu just by using the navigation menu’s management feature. This is an insanely awesome and powerful feature to make WordPress site management all the more easier for WordPress users.

Support for Author Templates

Each Author in WordPress has an ID, just like categories and pages.

In WordPress 3.0, you will be able to design individual author templates. This feature can come handy on multi-author blogs like, for example, the site you’re on: Six Revisions.

Let’s use an example to illustrate how this new functionality works: I am an author (Saad Bassi) here at Six Revisions while Jacob Gube is the Chief Editor.

Let’s pretend Jacob created a custom author page for me, called author-saad.php.

With the new functionality, WordPress will first look for author-saad.php before author.php in the template files to render my page differently from the default author.php design.

Multi-Site Feature with Only One WordPress 3.0 Installation

Another big update in WordPress 3.0 is the merging of WordPress MU – a fork of WordPress that lets the user create and manage hundreds of thousands of blogs with a single install of WordPress – and the plain-jane WordPress.

What this means in nutshell: You can create a number of websites using only one installation of WordPress.

Imagine that you’re a web developer who wants to build and host your client’s blogs and sites — you can run hundreds of client sites under one WordPress installation. If you have a scalable VPS, you can do all of this more reliably and affordably than ever before!

This feature is not enabled by default.

and lots more less notable features…

All of our existing customers using DiiMES will be upgraded to the new version by the end of January. All customers will be contacted to arrange upgrade roll out dates.

What’s new in Version 9?

• New Clean, Fresh Look & Feel using ajax.
• New People Management Engine
• New Workflow Engine to assist you with stepping through simple to complex workflows
• Organisation Manager
• New User Roles as well as User Groups to manage access
• Active Directory (Windows Domain/SBS/etc) security integration
• Web-based photo and picture editing
• Web-based Word Docs, Spreasheets & Presentation Access
• No Google Apps Used so your information is safe!

New Modules:

• Team Management Modules
• Organisation Manager Modules
• Online Commerce Portal (sell tickets, products and resource subscriptions from one shopping cart!)
• Full Mail, Calendar & other useful too integration

Updated Modules:

• Event Management Modules
• Notification Modules
• External Database Connectors (connect to existing systems)

This is the next installment in our online services stategy which includes our website (this site), our domain name registration service, our client support system and our webmail upgrades.

Drop on over to: http://support.dawes.biz/ to see it for yourself.

The first site to be released on the new verison of our platform will be the SU Teams Volunteer Management System that will be put in use in the next few weeks.

Stay Tuned for some screenshots soon!

Our pricing has dropped also for some domains.

customservers.com.au is where our new custom web hosting service will be centralised to, so when you need something new, whether it be a new domain, more hosting space, computer hardware or software or you just need to get a bug fixed or want to see the status of our servers, this is the one stop shop for where you will go. If you haven’t received your login details, let us know and we’ll get them out to you quick smart.

Head on over to: http://domains.customservers.com.au/ from now on to purchase, renew and manage your domains.

Our new mailserver is now up and running. We’ve moved from MailEnable to Smartermail as we’re finding it a much better interface to use and manage, even though it is a little more expensive to have.

We also have new sync features for Outlook and mobile devices as well as great new calendar and task functionality.

Some new features:

We will be moving everyone across (after being notified) to the new server a few at a time to minimise disruption.

Let us know what your thoughts by clicking on the heading of this article and dropping us a comment!

He was a genius, a musician and a great father and husband.

A man who will never be forgotten, as his talent and music will live long after our children’s children have grown up.

We miss you already bro, but we’ll keep listening and remembering the times you where on this earth to thrill us all.

Twitters that express our feelings right now:

John Mayer (johncmayer):
Dazed in the studio. A major strand of our cultural DNA has left us. RIP MJ.

Rob Thomas (ThisIsRobThomas):
Official. Michael jackson dies at 50. Speechless.

Sean “P. Diddy” Combs (iamdiddy):
Michael Jackson showed me that you can actually see the beat. He made the music come to life!! He made me believe in magic. I will miss him!

Hanson (hansonmusic):
It is difficult to think of a more impact full loss from the passing of an icon, than that of Michael Jackson.

The primary reasons for this are:

1. The site currently uses jQuery, which is not really a great advertisement of for ExtJS
2. The functionality of the site is somewhat hampered by the fact that we’re using a generic template.

So we’re rebuilding the whole site to deliver content in a much better way…

Stay tuned.

The official training session will be later in the year, however this presentation is to show a few of the great features coming together.

We’re hoping the session will not only be informative, but also a catalyst for great ideas to emerge and new gadgets and features to be added.