Wordpress 2.5.1 released

A new version of Wordpress was released today that includes over 70 fixes including several important security fixes. The security fixes affect the files wp-includes/pluggable.php, wp-admin/includes/media.php, and wp-admin/media.php which can be downloaded separately if the full Wordpress update is not desired yet. Webmasters who ran into problems with the new way of uploading media files will be reluctant to note that this issue has been fixed in Wordpress 2.5.1.

Included in the seventy fixes are several performance improvements for blogs with many categories and in the admin interface of Wordpress especially on the Dashboard, Write Post, and Edit Comments pages. I’m currently in the process of updating all my blogs and have not run into any problems yet. I usually do overwrite all files without disabling all plugins prior to this and I seldom encounter problems when updating Wordpress this way.

Most of the time it’s plugin related though. One note for all webmasters who are running Wordpress for some time now. Wordpress have added a new variable in the wp-config file called Secret Key. That variable introduces a little permanent randomness into the cryptographic functions used for cookies in WordPress. I suggest to update the Wordpress blogs as soon as possible, at least by uploading the files that are security related.