After deliberating for past few days, I have gone ahead and updated this blog to wordpress 2.3; Dexter.

Even though I usually update my softwares as soon as an update is available, I decided to adopt the wait and watch policy for a few days; especially after reading other bloggers were apprehensive about this release as well (John Chow).

However I finally decided to bite the bullet and update my blog to the latest version of wordpress. I also updated plugins I use in this blog to their latest release to ensure they would work properly.

I am happy to say, that the update went without a hitch and every thing seems to be working well! I did feel a bit of improvement in the speed, at which the admin panel loads. Also I am absolutely in love with the tagging feature included in this release; here is a list of new features that you would see once you update:

1. Native tagging support allows you to use tags in addition to categories on your post, if you so choose. We’ve included importers for the Ultimate Tag Warrior, Jerome’s Keywords, Simple Tags, and Bunny’s Technorati Tag plugins so if you’ve already been using a tagging plugin you can bring your data into the new system. The tagging system is also wicked-fast, so your host won’t mind.

2. Our new update notification lets you know when there is a new release of WordPress or when any of the plugins you use has an update available. It works by sending your blog URL, plugins, and version information to our new api.wordpress.org service which then compares it to the plugin database and tells you what the latest and greatest is you can use.

3. We’ve cleaned up URLs a bunch in a feature we call canonical URLs which does things like enforce your no-www preference, redirect posts with changed slugs so a link never goes bad, redirect URLs that get cut off in emails on similar to the correct post, and much more. This helps your users, and it also helps your search engine optimization, as search engines like for each page to be available in one canonical location.

4. Our new pending review feature will be great for multi-author blogs. It allows authors to submit a post for review by an editor or administrator, where before they would just have to save a draft and hope someone noticed it.

5. There is new advanced WYSIWYG functionality (we call it the kitchen sink button) that allows you to access some features of TinyMCE that were previously hidden.

Click here to download Wordpress 2.3