It was announced today that what was to be the next new version of WordPress, 2.4 - which was scheduled for a January 24 release has now been abandoned and replaced with version 2.5 and is now scheduled for an early March release.

Due to such major changes in the code base, and in the administration panel, the WordPress team chose not to rush things and opted, instead, to allow for more time for a quality release. Let’s hope this means not quite so many updates so soon after the initial release (i.e. 2.5.1, 2.5.2, etc, etc).

Matt made the announcement in the WordPress mailing list and had this to say:

This is the timeframe when 2.5 was originally schedule for, so we’re treating the originally planned 2.4 in December as a skipped release, as a result of both the holidays and the large changes which we weren’t able to start on until late October.

I downloaded and installed version 1.3-RC for WordPress MU this week. Download it here, if you want - - or wait for the final release to be coming soon!

Changes:

The main blog of the site doesn’t have to live at /blog/ if you’re using virtual hosts. #409

WordPress importer can now assign posts to other users. #435

The importer shouldn’t error on the foreach() loop when there’s only one author now #405

Privacy mode of new blog is stored properly. #423

Various cleanup patches by ktlee and momo360modena.
momo360modena gave the wpmu-* admin pages a nice facelift!

XMLRPC posting and the signup page are now disabled by default. They can be activated in the wpmu-options.php page. It is possible to change the xmlrpc setting for a particular blog by editing it via the wpmu-blogs.php page.

Individual blog’s upload quota can be edited on the edit blog page too.

2.3.1 fixes over twenty bugs. Some of the notable fixes are:

• Tagging support for Windows Live Writer
• Fixes for a login bug that affected those with a Blog Address different than their WordPress Address
• Faster taxonomy database queries, especially tag intersection queries
• Link importer fixes

Unfortunately, some security issues were found in 2.3. Specifically, an XSS problem that can be exploited if your php setup has register_globals enabled. For this reason, upgrading to 2.3.1 is advised.

See a full set of changes between 2.3 and 2.3.1 here on the Trac

Download the new version and upgrade your current copy.

Automattic, the fine folks who bring you Akismet (and WordPress.Com) have recently acquired/partnered with Gravatar. Gravatar is a service that serves up globally recognized avatars giving you the ability to have the save avatar everywhere you go! (remember all those forums where you have to choose from different avatars? With Gravatar, it’s portable - you can take it with you.)

Matt had this to say about the purchase: “Watching how Gravatar changed and evolved over the years I saw a service with great adoption and potential, but facing some classic problems of scale that successful sites are often lucky to run into. Scaling happens to be something my company, Automattic, is very good at, and as we started chatting with Tom Werner of Gravatar it became obvious there’s a lot of potential for combined forces, and I also saw a lot of parallels to Akismet, a product that does one thing, does it well, and has an open API so any platform can use it.So we worked out an arrangement to transfer the code and service from Tom to Automattic..”