Yes WordPress 3.1 is out. I have upgraded to 3.1 on every WordPress install I run including the 100% wp popdust. We have been using the 3.1 RC versions on our dev boxes for weeks so this transition has gone smoothly. While the admin bar and new internal linking feature are getting a lot of press, I am most excited about being able to more easily create archive pages of custom post types and to query custom types and taxonomies more easily. We also intend to be banging on get_users for some ‘related users’ features we are working on.
This was a challenging release for the WordPress core team and contributors and my hat goes off to them for their efforts and for making careful decisions about what to pull from this release in the interest of stability. Two yeas ago I was fortunate to be on the team at CBS that spearheaded the migration of 120 of the CBS Radio sites over to WordPress. Despite the fact that WordPress was already powering CNN blogs and a massive piece of NYTimes Traffic among countless others, the WordPress migration was still considered to be a bold and aggressive move in the snakeoil-polluted ‘enterprise CMS’ world. You are using WordPress to power the whole site? Are you crazy? Guess what – it worked great. Thanks to some great consulting from a top WordPress agency, we found that WordPress could handle anything we threw at it (and we threw a lot of crazy business rules at it let me tell you). There was no downside. Editorial started to enjoy creating lots of content, users became more engaged and loyal and jaded developers were suddenly inspired to be building on sophisticated open source software instead of putting in support tickets and devising ugly hacks to wrangle proprietary systems. Such a decision would be positively mainstream today. WordPress is simply a great content platform and it the features that just came out in 3.1 only further enhance its flexibility.