The thirteenth major release of the popular blogging software, WordPress 3.0 is now available. A total of 218 contributors and six months have resulted in the release that can be downloaded or directly upgraded from the Dashboard.

What’s new in 3.0? One of the best ways to find out is to try out the new Twenty Ten theme, which shows off many of the release’s (which is also called “Thelonius”) major new features, including custom backgrounds, headers, shortlinks, menus, post types and taxonomies.

Thelonius also features a lighter interface, more contextual help options, a boatload of bug fixes (1,217 to be exact), bulk updates and much more. This video from the WordPress (WordPress) team explains some of the new features:

Regarding the further development, Matt Mullenweg wrote:

“Over the next three months, we’re going to split into ninja/pirate teams focused on different areas of the around-WordPress experience, including the showcase, Codex, forums, profiles, update and compatibility APIs, theme directory, plugin directory, mailing lists, core plugins, wordcamp.org… the possibilities are endless… We think this investment of time will give us a much stronger infrastructure to grow WordPress.org for the many tens of millions of users that will join us during the 3.X release cycle.”

Are you excited to use the new WordPress 3.0?