WordPress 3.1.1 Released, Fixes Security Issues

The developers of the popular WordPress blogging script have just released an update that raises the version of WordPress to 3.1.1. WordPress 3.1.1 is a security update which means that it is a mandatory update for all webmasters who run public self-hosted WordPress blogs. The blog post that announced the new version of WordPress mentioned three security issues that have been fixed in the release: “The first hardens CSRF prevention in the media uploader. The second avoids a PHP crash in certain environments when handling devilishly devised links in comments, and the third addresses an XSS flaw”.

That alone should be reason enough to update WordPress to the latest version. The post mentions performance improvements without going into further details. It is therefor not clear if the improvements are measurable, and which areas of the platform have been improvement. The remaining changes list fixes for IIS6 support, taxonomy and pathinfo permalinks and various “query and taxonomy edge cases that caused some plugin compatibility issues”.

Update notifications are not displayed on all WordPress blogs yet. Webmasters should click on Dashboard > Updates to force WordPress to check for new updates. The WordPress 3.1.1. release should be listed on that page then. It is then possible to update the WordPress blog automatically from within the admin interface, or to download the new release and update the blog manually by uploading all files to the server and running the wp-admin/update.php script afterwards.

I have just finished updating 20 different WordPress blogs and the automatic updating worked on all but one without errors or problems. The one blog is a special case and it is likely that a plugin or special script interfered with the update.

The latest version of WordPress can be downloaded from this page.

Related Articles:

Author: Martin Brinkmann, Tuesday April 5, 2011 -
Tags:blogging, wordpress, wordpress update