In case you haven’t noticed it yet in your WordPress dashboard, it looks like WordPress 2.8 has officially been released! Don’t forget if you are currently using WordPress 2.7 or 2.7.1, you can use the one-click upgrade feature built into WordPress to upgrade!
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.
Kyle Eslick
Kyle Eslick is the founder and primary author of WordPress Hacks. You can learn more about him at KyleEslick.com or you can follow his personal tweets here.
Thanks for releasing this version. 
As your site has a lot of widgets, so I think it will significantly reduce the server usage. 
I'd love to do the 301 redirect, but it seems that with Wordpress's canonical URLs, redirects create infinite loops that ...
Great gallery. But I wasted 3 months to find a good free wordpress template and finally no one was customizable ...
Web developers’ ability to easily customize and extend WordPress makes it one of the most popular and powerful publishing platform. However every time a new WordPress version is released, developer’s should look at their customized solutions and accommodate changes.
W3Avenue has compiled a list of resources for WordPress developers that will help them quickly upgrade their themes or plugins to accommodate latest features (click comment name)
I upgraded to WP 2.8 the other day.
When I go to the widget section of the dashboard, only my left sidebar widgets show but cannot be edited. The right sidebar widgets do not show at all.
I am using Amazing Grace Theme if that matters.
I am not looking for a way to downgrade back to 2.71.
Unfortunately I forgot to do a backup before upgrading.
Be sure to backup since I noticed online many have had problems.
I just love the new version, the new widgets API is a cool feature and will help out a lot of us users who want to change things around and create our own widgets.
I also noticed that when you want to install a new plugin and want to upload it, you have to click on the upload link. It takes now 2 clicks to upload a plugin instead of 1 in the previous version. Still ok for me.
The new version is not good. I SAY, DO NOT UPGRADE!!!
It is very slow to edit the codes, 2.7.1 is much better.
Wait until they fix all problems before upgrading!
I was planing to update to Wordpress 2.8, but recently few of my clients reported lots of problems like
Internal server Error
Broken Permalinks and broken theme issue..
So for now
I will wait for some more reviews and issues before I will upgrade my blog to wordpress 2.8
I update all my wordpress blogs.
I didn’t had any issue with a single thing.
So I’ll stick to my upgrade.
I don’t like this version so much.
I find it hard to edit code in Edit theme.