The initial launch is offering the following features for self-hosted WordPress sites: WordPress.com Stats, a Twitter Widget (for your sidebar), Gravatar Hovercards, WP.me Shortlinks, Sharedaddy (WordPress.com’s super sharing tool), LaTeX, After the Deadline, and Shortcode Embeds.

This is huge.

One specific feature I’ve been waiting for is the Sharedaddy feature. The ability to have the fancy sharing options that WordPress.com offers its users.

Here is what it looks like and here’s how to get it.

click to download

Further more, you can read the backstory from Matt Mullenweg as to why Jetpack is so important to WordPress.

Some of the highlights are a redesigned linking workflow, a more streamlined writing interface, a refreshed blue admin scheme (which we use here at WPvibe.com), new Post Formats support, a new Network Admin, advanced taxonomy and custom fields queries, and most of all, with the 3.1 release, WordPress is more of a CMS than ever before.

Everyone (all 180+ contributors to the WordPress 3.1 release) is really excited about this release.

So what are you waiting for! Go upgrade your site to 3.1! (we already did

UPDATE: One thing that Brian Gardner just pointed out on Twitter, is that you no longer need a code snippet to disable the WordPress admin bar that was added to WordPress 3.1. That’s pretty awesome! Just go to your profile page and uncheck where you want the admin bar to show up.

Update #2: At the time of writing this, there are 21, 711 downloads of WordPress 3.1. Let’s see where it is at the end of the day

Today’s security warning is about the WordPress plugin “User Photo.”

This plugin has not been updated since 2008-12-4, which means over 2 years ago. You should always be careful when installing plugins that are over a year old, as it’s possible that older plugins can present a security threat to your WordPress installation.

This plugin’s security warning is the fact that when a user uploads an image for their user, it only checks the image header to see if it’s an image – even if it’s not actually an image.

How can I protect myself?
The security alert suggests that you can protect yourself by “hardening your webserver.” This is fairly vague, but I would recommend disabling this plugin altogether.

You can easily use the Gravatar service as an alternative solution, which would save you some bandwidth and allow users to always have an up to date photo without having to update on your site as well each time.

As a reminder, it’s always a good idea to keep your WordPress installation and plugins as up to date as possible. And don’t edit the core, if you can avoid it, so you can more easily upgrade.

One of the shortcodes I’m most interested in is the Corporate Pricing Table option. This is something that is really difficult to do, some a CSS and HTML perspective. To be able to use this functionality in a shortcode is awesome.

Other great shortcodes include button variations, icon buttons, big buttons, content boxes, toggled content, tabbed content, a slideshow, an image slider, easy tooltips, social media sharing, password protected content (wait, isn’t this part of WordPress already?), author information, multi-column layouts — such as a newspaper might have, column icon lists, dropcaps, and better quotations.

Here is what the pricing table and quotations look like.

Here’s how it works.

After you publish a post, you can go enable the Publicize options (Settings » Sharing).

Next, you can choose which services you want to connect to your blog. Facebook, Twitter, Yahoo! Updates, and MSN Messenger are the four options available today.

After that, you can enable other sharing options which will allow your visitors to share your post. These options include email, print, Reddit, Facebook, Digg, StumbleUpon, Twitter, and Press This (which will let you create a new blog post on WordPress.com based on the post you’re reading).

Lastly, a few misc. settings at the bottom, for those who like to really customize.

And when you’re back in the post editor, you’ll now have the option of which services you want to send your post to as well. This is great for people that really want to socialize their content, either to Twitter or Facebook – as those can be huge streams of traffic for people.

You can read more about it on WordPress.com.

Matt Mullenweg brought this idea to light just 4 years ago, and it’s finally a reality.

To kick off the launch of the premium marketplace, the Automattic team has selected two themes. Headlines and Shelf.

You can view both themes on WordPress.com as well.

What do you think about WordPress.com offering premium themes? Good for the industry or bad?

Update: Something I missed in the comments of the announcement, is that the theme owners will be providing support via a dedicated support forum, that you will only have access to if you purchase their theme(s). This is really important as it centralizes the points of contact, rather than sending people back to another site.

The new WordPress themes company is going to be a creative partnership between Cory Miller’s iThemes and Lisa Sabin-Wilson, the author of WordPress for Dummies.

Here’s what Lisa has to say about Allure on their website.

Smart and stylish WordPress themes designed for today’s smart and stylish women. Allure Themes is opening its doors in March 2011 – enter your email above and click “Submit” and we will keep you up to date on our progress.

Allure Themes brings together the WordPress commercial theme industry expertise of iThemes and the creative design and experience of WordPress For Dummies author, Lisa Sabin-Wilson.

We wish Lisa and the iThemes team all the best and that they are wildly successful. We are really excited to see what their team can produce.

You can also read the interview with Lisa Sabin-Wilson by Leland.

In the mean time, you can follow them on Twitter @AllureThemes

• New WordPress Admin Bar (here’s how to remove the admin bar)
• Theme Search
• Internal Linking
• Ajax’d Admin
• Updated WYSIWYG Editor
• Upgraded Password Reset functionality (#5919)

There were hundreds of bug fixes and enhancements made for this release. I’m really excited about this release, the entire core team has done a really good job.

WordPress had 20 million downloads last October, making it just three months to gain another 10 million downloads.

WordPress.com released some stats as well, noting that WordPress.com hosts almost half of all the WordPress-powered sites in the world.

Amazing work by the WordPress team. It’s a very proud moment for me as I’ve been involved for the past seven years of WordPress.

Source: WordPress Download Counter