This is a security update and it is therefore highly recommended to update the WordPress installation immediately (you should be seeing the “Please update now” ribbon on top of the screen when you log into your wordpress blog.

Download WordPress 2.8.3 from here.

Aside from the usual bug fixes, this update addresses a security issue where admin pages created by certain plugins could be viewed by unprivileged users. In other notes, the update reduces the memory usage of the dashboard (always welcome!), improves the automatic upgrade process (no longer will the upgrade accidentally delete files from a failed upgrade), fixes glitches in styling in the plugin editor and auto-save errors in IE as well as a fix to the rich-text-editor not loading properly due to compression issues.

For a full list of changes, head over to the official WordPress blog, and download WordPress 2.8.1 from here.

• New drag-and-drop widgets admin interface and new widgets API
• Syntax highlighting and function lookup built into plugin and theme editors
• Allow the dashboard widgets to be arranged in up to four columns
• Allow configuring the number of items to show on management pages with an option in Screen Options
• Improved database performance
• Support IIS 7.0 URL Rewrite Module
• Faster loading of admin pages via script compression and concatenation
• Improvements to the script loader: allows plugins to queue scripts for the front end head and footer, adds hooks for server side caching of compressed scripts, adds support for ENFORCE_GZIP constant (deflate is used by default since it’s faster)
• Load the minified versions of the scripts by default, define(‘SCRIPT_DEBUG’, true); can be used to load the development versions
• And many more!

For a list of all features, please have a look here.

You can download WordPress 2.8 here.

To read more about WordPress 2.7, please check out the changelog, download 2.7 here and read more about upgrading your WordPress installation here.