As first mentioned over at Javamancy mini, WordPress 2.8.5 was just released. WordPress 2.8.4 has held steady for more than two months at this point, and it almost seemed as if we, the blogging community, would be able to make it to December and the WordPress 2.9 release. Alas, no… Of course, since this is an incremental release on a fairly stable version, this should not dramatically and adversely impact most current operations.
Security continues to be the focus for the 2.8.5 version, as mentioned in the release post. This is a good thing, as the number of malicious actions against blogs and other social software sites has recently spiked. Some things that people have already observed are trackback DoS exploits and some suspicious plugins floating around the blogosphere. This version attempts to close some of these issues.
In addition, there is even mention of a newly-released plugin that helps to scan active systems for exploits and suspicious settings and content that may weaken the security of a WordPress installation.
If you operate WordPress blogs and did not yet upgrade from an earlier version of WordPress 2.8.x, you should strongly consider upgrading to this version. The customary testing procedure is recommended: download it, set it up in your testing environment and vet it through your test suite(s), prepare your CM machinery to handle the new version if it passes your tests, and deploy it to your production environment.
