- Image by faeryboots via Flickr
I was looking into an issue with the dashboard loading up on Army Mom: New Jersey when I noticed there’s a new beta for WordPress which fixes this issue and some other ones. Specifically, 2.8.1 fixes a number of issues, notably:
- 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.
If you’re affected by any of these, you might want to move onto the beta, otherwise wait for the official release to come out. Just make sure you take backups before upgrading to a beta version. If you think it’s hot in a Sahara hotel, you haven’t felt the hot water you’d be in if you break someone’s blog and find yourself in a position where you can’t fix it!
