In what has been a long time coming it looks like WordPress 3.0 is now available for WordPress users to download.  Everyone should see a “WordPress 3.0 is available! Please update now” banner in their dashboard which you can click to quickly upgrade, or for those of us that didn’t get the dashboard banner announcing the update being available, you can go into Tools -> Upgrade to complete the update.

WordPress 3.0 is a pretty significant update which includes the WordPressMU integration, 1,217 bug fixes and several important feature enhancements.   Here is a video with additional information:

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.