WordPress 2.8.1 is Officially Released

WordPress 2.8.1 is officially released as it was posted on the WordPress Blog by Ryan. This version had two beta releases and multiple patches until it was finally released today.

WordPress 2.8.1 fixes many bugs and improves security for plugin administration pages. In the previous version, admin pages added by certain plugins could be viewed by unprivileged users, resulting in information being leaked. Not all plugins are vulnerable to this problem, but WordPress staff and WPBeginner advise you to upgrade to 2.8.1 to be safe.

There were tons of changes made in WordPress 2.8.1, we will list a few highlighted here, but you can see the full list if you so desire.

• Certain themes were calling get_categories() in such a way that it would fail in 2.8. 2.8.1 works around this so these themes won’t have to change.
• Dashboard memory usage is reduced. Some people were running out of memory when loading the dashboard, resulting in an incomplete page.
• The automatic upgrade no longer accidentally deletes files when cleaning up from a failed upgrade.
• A problem where the rich text editor wasn’t being loaded due to compression issues has been worked around.
• Extra security has been put in place to better protect you from plugins that do not do explicit permission checks.
• Translation of role names fixed.
• wp_page_menu() defaults to sorting by the user specified menu order rather than the page title.
• Upload error messages are now correctly reported.
• Autosave error experienced by some IE users is fixed.
• Styling glitch in the plugin editor fixed.
• SSH2 filesystem requirements updated.
• Switched back to curl as the default transport.
• Updated the translation library to avoid a problem with mbstring.func_overload.
• Stricter inline style sanitization.
• Stricter menu security.
• Disabled code highlighting due to browser incompatibilities.
• RTL layout fixes.

Now if you choose to upgrade which we strongly recommend you to do so, you can with a one click upgrade that WordPress now have. Most users should already see a bar in the top of their wp-admin panel that asks you to upgrade.

Click on the upgrade button and follow the procedure. If you want to download a copy for your computer, head over to WordPress Downloads.