WordPress 3.0 release candidate 1 has been just released, as well as WordPress has turned 7 years old! The growth of WordPress has been really remarkable. In the last year itself, plugins and themes download have doubled, there are 1,528 people active on WordPress Trac with 13 committers! You may check out WordPress’ journey on Ozh’s blog (who has written various WordPress plugins). Coming back to the release, it has a lot of new features in it like the new theme TwentyTen, merging of WordPress MU and the new custom menus. Here is the list of changes from beta 2:

• Custom menus have been finished
• Multi-site is all set (WordPress MU has been merged into WordPress)
• The look of the WordPress admin has been lightened up a bit, so you can focus more on your content.
• There are still a couple of known issues.

By the way, this site is itself running the RC version! You can checkout the official birthday and release candidate announcements on the official WordPress blog. And at last, Happy Birthday WordPress!