WordPress has been busy again with an additional upgrade to its main open source blogging platform and also the announcement of the formal release of two additional products over the past 10 days.

WordPress MU (multi-user) and bbPress have both had their proper releases with WordPress MU 1.0 and bbPress 0.72. WordPress MU is in fact a version which allows you to run and manage multiple blogs off a single system, hence users in that sense – you can of course have many users in the “authors” sense on a normal WordPress installation. This is the software that powers the hosted version of WordPress at WordPress.com and is likely to see its initial markets coming from the worlds of journalism and education where multiple individual blogs held under one roof are common.

bbPress is forum software which has focused on being “lean and mean” and has all the features and speed that you would expect, coming as it does from the writers of WordPress. It can be run independently but will also be a great addition to those looking to include a Forum within their own Blogs. If you want to see it in action then the WordPress support forums uses it so that would be a good place to start.

Last, but by no means least, the new version of WordPress itself – WordPress 2.0.5 codename Ronan – is mainly a bug fix of some security elements and custom fields rather than a major upgrade although 2.1 is expected to be coming out sooner rather than later with some additional functionality. What more can they add?

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