I think maybe yesterday the WordPress crew was just trying to throw us off with the release of WordPress 2.5 RC3, because today at WordCamp Dallas, Matt Mullenweg announced that WordPress 2.5 is now available. The fact that the official release coincides with WordCamp almost seems planned.

Anyway, in order to get your copy, head over to WordPress.org, check out the new redesign, and upgrade your blog software!  Then come back here and share your thoughts on the new look and other changes.

WordPress.com users should have the upgrade within a week (though don’t expect it the next few days while the entire team is in Dallas).

Just a quick post to let you know that the third release candidate for WordPress 2.5 is now available.   If you want to try it out, you can download the zip file here.

I know this will disappoint some people because we were hoping to have it in time for WordCamp, but it is good to see they are taking the time to get everything right. Because WordPress 2.4 was skipped, this is like two releases at once.

As we continue to gear up for WordPress 2.5, have you gotten your theme ready for Gravatars? In the past it required plugins, but now WordPress 2.5 has built-in Gravatar support. This means going forward, themes can easily be released with Gravatars built-in to the theme because no plugin will be required.

So, you’ve got WordPress 2.5 installed and you’re ready to assign Gravatars to your comments? All you need to do is a quick code hack to the comments loop where you want the Gravatar to show up:

<?php if(function_exists(’get_avatar’)){ echo get_avatar($comment, ‘50?);} ?>

I encourage everyone to support WordPress by displaying Gravatars on their blogs once you’ve upgraded to WordPress 2.5.

With today’s announcement of the first release candidate of WordPress 2.5, anticipation is starting to build around the WordPress community.  The road map shows March 24th as the release date, and rumors are flying that we will have WordPress 2.5 prior to WordCamp Dallas on March 29th and 30th.    In the meantime, plugin authors can get a jump on testing their plugins to make sure everything is working properly with the update, then get a fix in place if needed.

Now that you have the good news, there is also some bad news.  I did run across one quick note about the release candidate that I wanted to share with everyone.   Apparently there are known problems with the automatic plugin upgrade feature, so you’ll want to avoid using the automatic plugin upgrade feature until a fix is in place.  Guess I’m glad they went with a release candidate to start!