Word Press 2.3: Hello, Dexter!

Rejoice! Yet another Word Press upgrade! All right, I am a bit sleep deprived and insane after having beaten a deadline, but to cut a long story short, Word Press 2.3, also known as “Dexter”, has been released. All WP users are advised up upgrade.

To find out more about this upgrade, check out the Word Press blog. As usual, detailed upgrade instructions are available.

For the record, my upgrade went off pretty smoothly, barring a few nervous moments, but nothing a few deep breaths and a cup of tea couldn’t solve! Plugins have been updated and reactivated—thank you to the new update notification that let me know which ones had updates available—and Writer’s Log seems to be running smoothly!

Word Press 2.3, apart from fixing a number of bugs, introduces a host of new features. It uses the new jQuery that claims to be “800% faster”. New features include native tagging support that allows you to use tags as well as categories with your posts. URLs have been cleaned up—they’re calling it canonical URLs. It makes sure that links don’t go bad, by redirecting posts with changed slugs. Of course, this aids search engine optimization.

The advanced WYSIWYG functionality allows you to access previously hidden TinyMCE features. A “pending review” function allows posts to be submitted for review in case of multi-author blogs. In addition, there is complete Atom 1.0 support. Of course, all this and more are detailed at the Word Press development blog.

Happy updating!

~PD

EDIT:: Some users have expressed security concerns over the new program and plugin update mechanism that was introduced in WP 2.3. According to the developers:

It works by sending your blog URL, plugins, and version information to our new api.wordpress.org service which then compares it to the plugin database and tells you whats the latest and greatest you can use.

They clarify that it sends only the PHP version and plugins list to the update checker, and both update notifications can be turned off using plugins. But many users feel that it should have been left to the user to enable or disable during installation, rather than needing to install plugins for it. For those interested, you need the Disable WP Core Update and Disable WP Plugin Updates plugins.