What is new in WordPress 2.8.1

• 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.

More Info

List of bugs fixed in Trac   |   WordPress Dev Blog   |   How to Upgrade WordPress

The WordPress 2.8.1 Beta

As I have stated earlier, WordPress 2.8.1 will be available very soon. If you are having problems in WP 2.8, you can try the new release : WP 2.8.1 Beta.

Some notable bugs that were fixed :

• 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.

Get WordPress 2.8.1 Beta

Manually download and install   |   Bugs Fixed   |   Auto Upgrade Instruction

The WordPress 2.9

If you are a developer, try out the new features in WordPress 2.9. The upgrade instruction is here.

Attention Plugin Authors

If your plugins were hosted at WordPress Extend, you can and should now add Changelog to your plugin’s readme.txt.

More Info

Nothing is perfect

Lastly, please don’t blame the WordPress team (as some people do), they are great enough to make it free.