But irregardless of that, the Automattic designed VaultPress backup solution for your self-hosted WordPress blog is finally exiting private beta.

For some background on the product itself, check out a post I wrote back in March on THE Tech Scoop here.

Essentially, VaultPress is built on the compute grid that serves the over 11 million WordPress.com blogs and somewhere upwards of 250 million monthly hits – this is a seriously robust system folks.

What’s nice about VaultPress is that there is a real-time image of where you are when you’re creating content and, should disaster occur, you can restore your data to that point-in-time prior to the disaster. That should relieve some heartaches from blog owners and content creators.

When you’re ready, head over to vaultpress.com to get signed sign up.

Version 3.0 will bring about some much sought after functionality to the CMS/blogging platform that has seen tremendous growth in its user base within the past couple of years.

There are numerous enhancements, but here I’m going to focus on what I feel are the Big 3 (in no specific order).

1. Multi-Site

The functionality that was once only available to the WPMU (Multi-User) folks on a custom install of WordPress is now going to be available to everyone (irregardless of where you host your WordPress installation). Being able to have a multi-user site opens up tremendous functionality; including, but not limited to, having a hyper-local site where multiple authors contribute content on the site and each has their own look and feel. Also for those sites that need to expand their presence to satisfy various niches or topic areas, but still need to fit under one larger “site umbrella” this multi-site functionality is going to be a welcome addition.

Now, activating multi-user will require some back-end coding. It has been somewhat straight-forward during this beta phase and I expect there to be more automation and ease of setup once the final release hits.

2. Menu Management

While I am personally most excited about the multi-site capability, I must say that the new menu management system is running a close 2nd on my list of things to look forward to.

If you’re a user of WordPress themes from WooThemes you’ll be pretty familiar with this functionality as Automattic, the company behind WordPress, has worked with the WooThemes team and leveraged much of that flexibility into the 3.0 release.

With the new menu management you will have full control over your site’s navigation menus. Using a drag and drop administrative interface you’ll be able to include pages, categories, links (internal and external to your blog), etc. to your top navigation. Trust me, this is huge – I’ve already disabled 3rd-party plug-ins on some of my blogs that performed this functionality now that’s it’s going to be integrated into the core of WordPress.

Image via: http://www.mashable.com

3. Custom Post Types

This bit of functionality is important and with all the fanfare around some of the other new cool features, the importance of custom post types could get lost in the shuffle. So let me explain just why this is a big deal.

Today in WordPress, you can publish two types of content; either a post or a page. That’s fine and dandy, but incredibly limiting. Now with custom post types consider this; you have a a collection of content you want to publish that contains nothing but photos. Now imagine creating a custom post type for a photo gallery, for example, and have a fresh “custom” look and feel for photo galleries within your blog. Again, this alleviates the need of 3rd-party plug-ins that handled this capability since here it will be integrated directly into the core of WordPress.

I’ll throw one more in for posterity sake…

4. New Default Theme

Image via: http://www.blogohblog.com

Ah yes, Kubrick has run it’s course. I think I recall Matt saying at WordCampSF that the Kubrick default theme had been around for about 3 years. That’s way too long. The new default theme, aptly named 2010 brings about an incredibly clean look and feel and added functionality that complement what we can expect from version 3.0.

One of those components is the ability to have a custom background image for every page/category of your blog.

Again, with WordCampSF wrapping up and a productive two day code sprint immediately afterward it was good to see Beta 2 released to the user community. I know there are six WordCamps remaining on the calendar before the end of May, and if progress continues to happen as it has, we should see not only the release candidate but the final version before the end of June.

Do you want to keep up with the latest sport scores?

Check in on your fantasy pools?

It’s all here.

Watch this:

(While the video processes, the quality might not be 100% — stay tuned, it will process into HD shortly. Also, it may not be available via your iPhone for about 15-20 minutes after publishing. YouTube will convert it and make it accessible soon!)

From their website:

Download new daily puzzles from newspapers including the New York Times, the Wall Street Journal, the Village Voice, and many more! Crosswords for iPhone also supports paid puzzle subscriptions, allowing you to download puzzles from secure websites directly to your iPhone.

Watch the Video Demo Here

Here are a few of the Tweets on #googlebuzz:

Google Buzz 101

If you want to see what Google Buzz is and how it’s integrated into Gmail, watch this video I just created:

My Thoughts on Google Buzz

In using Google Buzz, one of the first things I noticed was that not only were my “buzzes” going to the new Buzz section, they were also flooding into my inbox in Gmail creating double the noise. The beauty with Twitter is that I can shut the website off or close Tweetdeck. It’s not something that is forcing its way into my life like an ex-boyfriend or a stray cat. Apparently, this is a feature that was definitely chosen and there is no visible way to turn it off. One Twitterer recommended setting up a filter… Yeahhh, I’ll filter the buzzes all right – straight into my TRASH!

Second, Google Buzz has zero, easy-to-find settings and the finding friends option is not clearly marked from the Gmail add-on. The interface is pretty simple to use and it mimics the Google Mail interface nicely. For people who are used to using Gmail, this will be an easy thing to use. However, I think they need to make finding friends and the general settings much more prominent on the interface.

Third, Google Buzz has a lot of people talking about geolocation based messaging. What this means is that when you are updating your status on Buzz, it will also point out to your followers where you are. This has many issues for me — I like using apps like Foursquare and Gowalla because they are optional. When I am cool with people knowing where I am (ie: eating sushi with a group of people) I tell the world. If I am NOT cool with people knowing where I am (ie: traveling to a city alone where I don’t really know anyone), I like to go incognito. We’ll see how easy it is to turn this geolocation based messaging on/off. If it’s not, it’s a huge invasion of privacy and freaks me out a little.

Fourth, I think this is Google’s way of trying to rescuciate a dead Google Wave… In all honesty, they should be focusing their attention on integrating Google Wave into Gmail… Oh wait, Google Buzz integrates into Gmail… Google Buzz also does threaded messaging like Wave did… I’m confused. Are they the same? Are they different? What’s happening with Wave? Oh Google… One of my favorite Tweets of the morning is this one:

Fifth, Google Buzz is making use of the mobile market but using browser-based updating instead of an app format. I much prefer to be able to access everything via apps instead of using Safari on my iPhone so I hope that they make an app for this if it really does take off (not a prediction… I predict it dies.)

The world doesn’t need another social media network. The world needs a much more streamlined approach to this entire thing. People want to have improved connections and to be able to update ONE social networking service and not feel the need to update many.

However… those are just my rants. What are your thoughts?

Check it out here:
http://wordpress.org/extend/themes/bahama

Congrats guys on another awesome theme!

“I like to think WordPress found me that night. Although, admittedly, it probably was my search term of “blogging platform” that brought us together. In any case, on that New Year’s Eve in 2005, I installed my first WordPress install and “customized” the Kubrick theme. It was love at first one-click-install.”

Read the rest of that guest post here.