Back in late august everyone was pleased enough to download and try the beta release of Wordpress 2.3 and the new features and code update impressed a great number of Wordpress users out there and finally the time has come that we have the full featured final release of the famous and beloved open-source blogging system in our hands.

Wordpress 2.3 Finally Launches

Wordpress 2.3 is at last out of the beta phase and is ready to go live on millions of blogs around the Internet. This new version is of course free to download and use because Wordpress is an open-source system and has been codenamed Dexter paying tribute to the great tenor saxophonist Dexter Gordon. This release includes native tagging support, plugin update notification, URL handling improvements, and much more.

Wordpress 2.3 has got some new features

Every Wordpress release comes bundled with some new features and a thousand bug fixes. Here is a list of the feature updates that come with Wordpress 2.3

• Tagging Support: Finally they have added this feature to the core of Wordpress and the good thing is that instead of categorizing your posts you can even tag them with keywords and also make a tag cloud of the keywords on the fly. Plus there is an option to import tags from UTW, Jerome’s Keywords, Simple Tags, and Bunny’s Technorati Tag plugins.
• Update Notifications: This is another new but very useful feature in Wordpress 2.3 which will let you know when there is a new release of WordPress or when any of the plugins you use has an update available.
• Canonical URLs: This is the new feature which will give your Wordpress more search engine optimization love. Basically it 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.
• Pending Review: This feature will allow 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. Though I see nothing new in this feature. For as far as I know a Contributor could do the same in earlier versions of Wordpress.
• Advanced WYSIWYG: There is new advanced WYSIWYG functionality that allows you to access some features of TinyMCE that were previously hidden.

These are the all new interesting features but if you are a developer and want more Wordpress cookies then you can also take a look at the new Wordpress 2.3 developer features.

Download Wordpress 2.3

Download Wordpress 2.3 right away or take a minute and give a piece of your thought to the discussion below.

To Upgrade or not to Upgrade?

That is a nice question! and if you want me to answer straight away then the answer is definitely NO! The reason for this is because some of the features are still very buggy (as reported by some of my wise friends) plus if you have a good blog search engine optimization then perhaps the new Canonical URLs feature might conflict with your old seo techniques.

On the other hand I was amazed to see that the new tagging support feature does not add tag keywords as meta keywords of your post or page (big drawback in terms of blog search engine optimization)

So if you still seek some search engine love then I suggest you to wait and not uprgade to Wordpress 2.3 right away.