After 3 months of work, the folks at WordPress have released WordPress 2.3 to Public Beta. According to Matt Mullenweg, founding developer of WordPress:

(photo source: Wikipedia)

Some of the features of 2.3 include plugin and core update notification, built-in tags support, faster javascript, and SEO-friendly URL redirection.

However all of the new functionality is still very rough, so only test the beta if you are comfortable troubleshooting PHP issues, filing tickets, and backing up your data religiously.

These sound like great updates. Couple of things, though:

1. You don’t have to worry about any of this if your blog is WordPress hosted – only if you have a WordPress blog that you host elsewhere. For more information on what that means, read my previous post on different blog platform.
2. To reiterate Matt, if you aren’t comfortable with technical issues, you shouldn’t install this WordPress update.
3. Most places that you can host WordPress blogs will not have the latest version of WordPress, and for sure not a Beta version.
4. Back up your entire blog and database. In the past, trying to upgrade WordPress wipes out your blog.
5. Until we hear that this is a somewhat stable version, it may make the most sense to set up a sandbox blog, just installing this new beta somewhere aside from your main blog.

We’ll be testing WordPress 2.3 Beta out over here, and will be presenting our review of the updates later this week. Stay tuned!