2.5 is coming along thanks to the fantastic feedback you guys provided on RC1 (over 580 pingbacks and counting), and we’re now ready to show you a bit more of a peek with a short screencast covering the new dashboard and uploader and Release Candidate 2. First here’s the screencast, which is also available embedded below, as a Flash movie, or as a 17mb AVI download:

I’ve uploaded more than a thousand photos already into the new gallery system — it works.

(This was my first screencast, but I hope we can have more on WordPress.org and our documentation in the future.)

If you make frequent backups and you’re interested in helping us out with development by testing the very latest, download and install Release Candidate 2 of WordPress 2.5, and join our testers mailing list to report any bugs you find in the code.

Finally with regards to theme and plugin compatibility, we’ve had no reports of any broken themes in this upgrade, which makes sense because we didn’t really change anything core about themes, just added new optional capabilities like Gravatars. Plugins that work with the admin may require updating to take advantage of the new, cleaner UI in WordPress 2.5.

The community has started to keep a list here of which plugins work great and which don’t. It’s worth looking at, or even better just deactivate your plugins before upgrading for 2.5 and let the built-in updater notify and give you one-click upgrades to plugins you have installed, assuming the developer is cool and has updated their code for 2.5 already.

A customizable dashboard, multi-file upload, built-in galleries, one-click plugin upgrades, tag management, built-in Gravatars, full text feeds, and faster load times sound interesting? Then WordPress 2.5 might be the release for you. It’s been in the oven for a while, and we’re finally ready to open the doors a bit to give you a taste.

For the past few months, we’ve been working with our friends at Happy Cog — Jeffrey Zeldman, Jason Santa Maria, and Liz Danzico — to redesign WordPress from the ground-up. The result is a new way of interacting with WordPress that will remain familiar to seasoned users while improving the experience for everyone. This isn’t just a fresh coat of paint — we’ve re-thought the look of WordPress, as well as how it’s organized so that you can forget about the software and focus on your own creative pursuits.

Here are a few vignettes of what’s in store.

The Dashboard

The Dashboard’s most important role is to inform quickly and get you to where you’re headed in the admin. In interviewing users, we found that most of you ignore the Dashboard entirely — its useful information being mostly hidden in an overly complex design. The new Dashboard is focused on the most relevant tasks at hand: a quick summary of what’s published and scheduled for publication, the latest comments and incoming links, blog stats, and WordPress updates and news. You can add your own RSS feeds and edit the way information is presented so that the new Dashboard conforms to the way you use WordPress.

Navigation

The WordPress navigation has confounded even sophisticated users. With the new design, we’ve cut the number of navigation options in half, separating the primary functions (writing, managing posts and pages, editing the blog’s design, and managing comments) from secondary functions. This presents information at a more comfortable pace, revealing only the information that’s necessary. Everything you need is still there — just better organized. (Especially for people new to WP.)

Write

By far, the most frequently accessed part of WordPress is the Write screen. It gets the job done, but its myriad options can be overwhelming. The new write screen only displays the information that you’ll use most often. It displays the most common fields in a way that makes posting incredibly easy. Additional options are hidden away until you need them. The new Write screen anticipates the natural flow of the way you write, and is smart enough to remember the way you left it so that your preferred writing environment is always quickly available. The new visual editor even has a handy full-screen mode to help block out distractions while composing your newest post. (My personal favorite new feature.)

Manage

The Manage screens have been redesigned and unified so that now, managing your pages, posts, media, and comments all use similar, consistent interfaces. We’ve omitted superfluous information and made what’s important faster to find. We believe these changes will make you a faster, more proficient blogger.

You might also notice there are some new colors, the dashboard feels much fresher and lighter. If you’re jonesing for the old look under your user options you can now select the “classic” colors and get those old blues back. (It’s also pluggable so people can easily add or share their own color schemes.)

If you make frequent backups and you’re interested in helping us out with development by testing the new code, download and install Release Candidate 1 of WordPress 2.5, and join our testers mailing list to report any bugs you find in the code.

We’re also interested in feedback on the new interface and would love to hear your opinions, thoughts, rants, raves, and anything in between. We created a special email address just for the occasion: 2.5-feedback@wordpress.org.

The software is basically done and stable, and could be released today, but we’d like to incorporate feedback from a wider audience before making it available to the general public. After a few days of your feedback we’ll set a final release date. Personally, I can’t wait.

WordPress 2.3.3 is an urgent security release. If you have registration enabled a flaw was found in the XML-RPC implementation such that a specially crafted request would allow a user to edit posts of other users on that blog. In addition to fixing this security flaw, 2.3.3 fixes a few minor bugs. If you are interested only in the security fix, download the fixed version of xmlrpc.php and copy it over your existing xmlrpc.php. Otherwise, you can get the entire release here.

Also, there is a vulnerability in the WP-Forum plugin that is being actively exploited right now. If you are using this plugin, please remove it until an update is available from its author.

Since we are talking security, remember to use strong passwords and change them regularly.  While you’re updating WP and your plugins, consider refreshing your passwords.

I’m thrilled to announce that Version 2.3 “Dexter” of WordPress is now ready for the world. This release includes native tagging support, plugin update notification, URL handling improvements, and much more. This release is named for the great tenor saxophonist Dexter Gordon.

The entire team is really proud of this release, and I’m happy that this is our second on-time release under our new development schedule. The grand experiment of a more agile WordPress with significant features in the hands of users more often is working. I could write a blog post about each new feature, but I’ll try to be brief:

1. Native tagging support allows you to use tags in addition to categories on your posts, if you so choose. We’ve included importers for the Ultimate Tag Warrior, Jerome’s Keywords, Simple Tags, and Bunny’s Technorati Tag plugins so if you’ve already been using a tagging plugin you can bring your data into the new system. The tagging system is also wicked-fast, so your host won’t mind.
2. Our new update notification lets you know when there is a new release of WordPress or when any of the plugins you use has an update available. It works by sending your blog URL, plugins, and version information to our new api.wordpress.org service which then compares it to the plugin database and tells you whats the latest and greatest you can use.
3. We’ve cleaned up URLs a bunch in a feature we call canonical URLs which does things like enforce your no-www preference, redirect posts with changed slugs so a link never goes bad, redirect URLs that get cut off in emails on similar to the correct post, and much more. This helps your users, and it also helps your search engine optimization, as search engines like for each page to be available in one canonical location. More info here.
4. Our new pending review feature will be great for multi-author blogs. It allows authors to submit a post for review by an editor or administrator, where before they would just have to save a draft and hope someone noticed it.
5. There is new advanced WYSIWYG functionality (