If you haven’t already noticed, at some point yesterday the WordPress team released a crucial security update to the WordPress software.

If you are someone who schedules posts ahead of time, you’ll want to read this post explaining why your future-dated posts may be at risk.  Here is some more information about the release:

• Performance improvements for post sanitization when raw content is required (#5325).
• Changes to is_admin() to ensure that it is only true for admin pages thereby protecting against exposing draft posts. (#5487).
• Suppression of database errors unless WP_DEBUG is true (#5473).
• Check for valid database connection information during install and display and error if the install fails due to database rights (#5495).
• Support for a custom database down page to be displayed on database connection errors (#5500).
• Changes to make sure we are more selective in what we make clickable, this introduces different rules for different uri types ([6450]).
• Changes to wp-mail.php to escape the error messages when displaying them to avoid a possible XSS attack (#5484).
• Changes to ensure that the post password is only exposed by the xmlrpc method metaWeblog.getRecentPosts to users with rights to edit a post (#5535).
• Changes to the information exposed the wp.getAuthors xmlrpc method to reduce the information exposed and add a capabilities check (#5534).
• Addition of extra capabilities checks to xmlrpc methods ([6504]).
• Addition of extra capabilities checks to APP server ([6508]).
• Changes to validate_file() to improve its traversal attempt detection when running on windows ([6521]).

In case you didn’t see the alert in your WordPress dashboard, it looks like WordPress 2.3.1 is now available for download.   Included are tagging fixes for Windows Live Writer, as well as over 20 bug fixes.

It is always good to avoid vulnerability by always using the most current version of WordPress, so I recommend upgrading as soon as you get the chance.

Only a few weeks after the successful release of WordPress 2.3, it looks like the WordPress team is back at it again with their announcement that the next release, WordPress 2.3.1, is now available for download.

As is the case with most .1 releases, this release’s primary function will be to patch up a bunch of bugs that have been discovered in 2.3.  Click here to see a full list of the bugs that will be covered in this release.

As a quick reminder, this release is still in beta, so you won’t want to upgrade quite yet unless you have a good backup!