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.

Due to this being a security update, it is strongly recommended that you upgrade your WordPress 2.8 installations as soon as possible.  This can quickly and easily be done via your WordPress administrator panel (for WordPress 2.7 and newer installations) via Tools –> Upgrade, or you can manually download it here. 

If you’d like to read the official announcement, you can see it here.

Unfortunately, with each new WordPress branch comes changes which sometimes break WordPress plugins, create problems with the WordPress theme you are using, and usually includes changes to the code.   If you upgrade before the themes or plugins you rely on have been updated, this can cause problems.   The iThemes team recently touched on this subject with their post, When Should I Upgrade WordPress?  Their post also includes five helpful things that need done BEFORE you do your one-click upgrade:

1. Make a backup of all your site data
2. Upgrade of all your plugins
3. Visit plugin and theme author websites
4. Disable all plugins
5. Ask yourself if you need to upgrade now

I also recommend waiting a week or so to view feedback before upgrading.

I know several of you haven’t upgraded WordPress to 2.8 yet.   How long do you plan on waiting until you upgrade your WordPress installation?  Please include which version of WordPress you are currently using with your comment!

The changes from WordPress 2.7 aren’t as noticable as they were from 2.6 to 2.7, but it is always worth upgrading to the latest installation in my opinion.   As far as what is new, here is what the WordPress team had to say about the improvements in WordPress 2.8:

Major New Improvements

First and foremost, 2.8 is way faster to use. We’ve changed the way WordPress does style and scripting.

The core and plugin updaters in previous versions of WordPress have been such a success we decided to bring the same to themes. You can now browse the entire theme directory and install a theme with one click from the comfort of your WordPress dashboard.

If you make edits or tweaks to themes or plugins from your dashboard, you’ll appreciate the new CodePress editor which gives syntax highlighting to the previously-plain editor. Also there is now contextual documentation for the functions in the file you’re editing linked right below the editor.

If you were ever frustrated with widgets before, this release should be your savior. We’ve completely redesigned the widgets interface (which we didn’t have time to in 2.7) to allow you to do things like edit widgets on the fly, have multiple copies of the same widget, drag and drop widgets between sidebars, and save inactive widgets so you don’t lose all their settings. Developers now have access to a much cleaner and robust API for creating widgets as well.

Finally you should explore the new Screen Options on every page. It’s the tab in the top right. Now, for example, if you have a wide monitor you could set up your dashboard to have four columns of widgets instead of the two it has by default. On other pages you can change how many items show per page.

You can view the entire list of changes here.

According to the official WordPress blog, WordPress 2.8 Release Candidate 1 was officially released about an hour ago.   Here is their release candidate 1 official announcement:

With Release Candidate 1, we think WordPress 2.8 is ready and complete.  Download it, test it, and tell us what you think.  If you don’t uncover any bad bugs, 2.8 will be released on Wednesday the 10th.

If you’re interested in what has changed since beta 2, consult the changelog.

You can download Release Candidate 1 here, and consult the changelog from Beta 2 here.   If you are wondering what all is new with WordPress 2.8, check out this post by TechnoSailor.

As a result, I wanted to do a quick post to bring to your attention a couple of the things we are hearing from the event, and in particular, from Matt Mullenweg’s “State of the Word” address, which he does at each WordCamp event:

• WordPress 2.8 Coming VERY Soon!
• There have been hints from the WordPress team about adding a section to their theme repository for GPL-compliant premium themes (paid themes which comply with GPL).  I haven’t gotten clarification yet if their will also be a similar site setup for premium plugins that comply with GPL.
• WordPressMU and WordPress.org will be merging.

To those of you that attended the event, let us know about anything we missed in the comments!

Information Sources:

• The WordCamp Report from the event.
• Various tweets from a number of web desginers in attendance.

Note: If you aren’t comfortable using beta software, we recommend you hold off on using WordPress 2.8 until the first release candidate is announced.

For those interested, here are a few of the things included with the WordPress 2.8 Beta 1 release:

• New Theme Installer routines
• Add CodePress syntax highlighting to Theme and Plugin editors
• Use “Custom Header” for menu text and revise Default theme to reflect change
• Separate Comments into a separate postbox, from Discussion postbox, on the Edit Post screen
• Make tags accessible without Javascript on the edit screen
• Don’t ask for confirmation when marking a comment as spam
• Don’t notify post author of own comments
• Allow the dashboard widgets to be arranged in up to four columns as set via the Screen Options tab
• Add column “Rating” in Administration > Links > Edit
• Improve installer to help people entering wrong email addresses
• Per Page option for plugins
• Show absolute date instead of relative date for scheduled posts
• Autosave post/page when pressing Control/Command+S
• Add toggle all button to the Gallery tab in the uploader
• Support more than one gallery on the same page
• Add per page option to Screen Options for comments, posts, pages, media, categories, and tags
• Show Tools menu for all users so they can access Turbo
• Fix most popular link category list
• Add description field for tags
• “Choose a city in the same timezone as you” for Timezone in Administration > Settings > General
• In upgrade process, provide better explanation for database upgrade message
• Enforce unique email addresses in Add/Edit users
• Hide things that need to be available to screen readers via offscreen positioning
• Use invisible class for hiding labels and legends
• Use a semantic class name for text targeted to screen readers

To those who are interested in putting WordPress 2.8 to the test, you can download it here.

According to Matt:

For those of you who aren’t familiar with the product, Intense Debate supercharges the comment section of WordPress blogs and other sites with cool features like threading, reply by email, voting, reputation, and global profiles. There are a few companies tackling this space right now, but I was impressed with how much ID (Intense Debate) has been able to do with a small team, and happy to find that their common platform (PHP and MySQL) would make integration a lot easier.

Going forward, the plan is to keep Intense Debate available as a platform-agnostic independent service, much like Akismet. We’ll start to integrate its features into WordPress core, WordPress.com, and Gravatar as appropriate. For example, comment threading is going to be in WordPress 2.7, but reply by email is a lot easier to implement on a hosted service like WordPress.com. We’re also going to be able to lend our expertise in scaling to the ID team to make sure their users enjoy the same hassle-free speed and bulletproof availability as users of other Automattic services.

Long-term, I think that comments are the most crucial interaction point for blogs, and an area that deserves a lot of investment and innovation. Comments really haven’t changed in a decade, and it’s time to spice things up a little.

So, what does this mean for comments in WordPress?   It appears that Automattic is serious about improving WordPress comments and adding additional features, so I think the WordPress community has a lot to look forward to (think of the Gravatar or BuddyPress improvements).   It looks like we can also expect some of Intense Debates functionality to be built into the WordPress install at some point, hopefully as soon as WordPress 2.8 or 2.9!