If you’ve visited your WordPress site’s dashboard in the past 24 hours you probably noticed that WordPress 2.9 is now available to download.    I know many people like to wait to upgrade to give theme and plugin authors a chance to create updates, but the new changes in WordPress 2.9 seem to be playing nice with everything based upon all the reports I’ve read.  I’ve also upgraded most of my websites that use WordPress without any theme or plugin conflicts.

If you are interested in learning about what is new in WordPress 2.9, there is a great write up posted on Quick Online Tips which you can view here.  The post features the following new features:

1. Thrash It
2. Image Editor
3. Batch Plugin Update
4. Easier Video Embeds
5. Database Optimization Support

What is your favorite new feature in WordPress 2.9?

Yesterday there was a ton of discussion via Twitter and on several blogs regarding a comment reset “exploit” which surfaced for the WordPress 2.8.x branch.  To avoid recapping the exploit, if you want to learn more about this exploit, check out this great post from our friend Leland of Theme Lab.  Along with this exploit came the speculation that WordPress 2.8.4 was soon to follow with a fix.

Well, it turns out these people were correct, as this morning I found a friendly message in my dashboard telling me that WordPress 2.8.4 was ready for me to upgrade!  This was especially good news for me, as for some reason people believe that because I run a WordPress fan blog, that they should try it out on this website. 

Back in April 2009, we wrote about Automattic purchasing WP.com. At the time there was a lot of speculation about what the role of this incredible new domain would be.  It has now been a few months since they took over possession and it looks like we finally have some hints about what the role of this domain may be.

As of the publishing of this post, it looks like WP.com still redirects to WordPress.com, but if you visit their Get WordPress subdomain, you can see the following splash page promoting their hosted service, as well as a quick comparison to WordPress.org:

It will be interesting to see what they decide to do with the root of the domain.   I can’t help but wonder if it would be a good idea to move WordPress.com to a shorter domain like WP.com, giving their bloggers a smaller URL for their hosted blogs. In the age of Twitter it would be nice to have a domain like xxxx.wp.com instead of xxxx.wordpress.com.

What would you like to see WP.com ultimately used for?

After the success we’ve had with new branch releases of the past few WordPress branches (2.6 and 2.7 both come to mind), it is a little surprising to see that we already have yet another security patch, this time being WordPress 2.8.3.  Because this is a security update, it is highly recommended that everyone take a moment to upgrade their WordPress installation.

Here is what the WordPress team had to say about the WordPress 2.8.3 security update:

Unfortunately, I missed some places when fixing the privilege escalation issues for 2.8.1.  Luckily, the entire WordPress community has our backs.  Several folks in the community dug deeper and discovered areas that were overlooked.  With their help, the remaining issues are fixed in 2.8.3.  Since this is a security release, upgrading is highly recommended.  Download 2.8.3, or upgrade automatically from your admin.

The ribbon reminder in your dashboard just showed up, so you can now do your automatic upgrade, or manually download WordPress 2.8.3 from here.

These days there are so many excellent WordPress blogs and articles, it can be hard to keep up with all the brilliant WordPress articles around, so here are some great articles I’ve saved on my feed reader; feel free to add some posts you’ve found around the web in the comments.

1. First up, ‘10 Handy WordPress Comments Hacks‘ on Smashing Magazine by Jean-Baptiste Jung of WP Recipes fame.
2. Next, a post on Chris Coyier and Jeff Starr’s Digging into WordPress caught my eye: ‘Include jQuery in WordPress (the right way)‘. In this post, as you might have guessed, Chris shows how to include jQuery the right way – using the copy of jQuery built into WordPress.
3. Third, a post on WPWebHost in two parts – ‘Securing your WordPress Install the Foolproof Way’ – parts one and two. A couple of tips in there that you might not have thought of.
4. Another post that caught my eye was ‘Multiple WordPress Loops Explained‘. I would say more, but it’s pretty self explanatory.
5. A post that has been around a while, but is worth mentioning anyway – WPCandy presents ‘10 Things You Can Do With WordPress Besides Blogging‘. Again, pretty self explanatory, but definately worth a look.
6. And finally, a little plug for a post I wrote the other day – ‘10 Tips to Improve Your WordPress Theme‘. Check it out. Some rather nice tips in there.

And there we have it. Six links of note!  Add your own in the comments.