WordPress 2.5 is finally out.

The improvements in 2.5 are numerous: multi-file uploading, one-click plugin upgrades, built-in galleries, customizable dashboard, salted passwords and cookie encryption, media library, a WYSIWYG that doesn’t mess with your code, concurrent post editing protection, full-screen writing, and search that covers posts and pages.

Click here to get your latest copy of Wordpress now.

Popularity: 2% [?]

WP-Cache Plugin is one of the top 10 plugin for WordPress Blog. Basically, it speeds up your site and if your blog has high traffic, it is recommended that you have it installed. Remember to delete cache if you edit your wordpress theme.

WP-Cache is an extremely efficient WordPress page caching system to make you site much faster and responsive. It works by caching Worpress pages and storing them in a static file for serving future requests directly from the file rather than loading and compiling the whole PHP code and the building the page from the database. WP-Cache allows to serve hundred of times more pages per second, and to reduce the response time from several tenths of seconds to less than a millisecond.

WP-Cache started from the ”’Staticize Reloaded”’ by matt and billzeller. Most of their recommendations also apply to WP-Cache. Current version, WP-Cache2, is a huge improvement over previous versions of WP-Cache.

WP-Cache is composed of two parts:

1. Two-phases Wordpress hooks. The first is called at the very begining –wp-cache-phase1.php– when just few code has been compiled. The second –wp-cache-phase2.php– after all plugins have been executed. The first phase checks if the requested URL is already cached, if so it serves from the static file and finishes. The second phase stores the generated page in a static file for further request.
2. The WP-Cache plugin. This plugin configures and manages the whole process. It is easy to use and self-documented. It allows yoy to enable or disable cache, define expiration time for static pages, define rules for rejecting and accepting which URLs and php files can be cached, and shows and delete pages in cache.

Current version is 2.1.2 updated on 2007-09-21

Click here to stay updated with the latest version.

Popularity: 4% [?]

Akismet Plugin is the most popular anti-spam plugin. It checks your comments against the Akismet web service to see if they look like spam or not. You need a WordPress.com API key to use it. You can review the spam it catches under “Comments.” To show off your Akismet stats just put <?php akismet_counter(); ?> in your template.

Current version is 2.1.4 updated on 2008-2-12

Click here to stay updated with the latest version

Popularity: 3% [?]

Google XML Sitemaps Plugin is highly recommend. This plugin will create a Google sitemaps compliant XML-Sitemap of your WordPress blog. It supports all of the WordPress generated pages as well as custom ones. Everytime you edit or create a post, your sitemap is updated and all major search engines that support the sitemap protocol, like ASK.com, Google, MSN Search and YAHOO, are notified about the update.

Current version is 3.0.3 updated on 2007-12-30

Click here to stay updated with the latest version.

Popularity: 3% [?]

All in One SEO Pack Plugin is highly recommend. It optimizes your Wordpress blog for Search Engines. Your blog post will rank higher as the title tag and meta description are Search Engine optimized.

Here are the features.

• Automatically optimizes your titles for search engines
• Generates META tags automatically
• Avoids the typical duplicate content found on Wordpress blogs
• For Wordpress 2.3 you don’t even have to look at the options, it works out-of-the-box. Just install.
• You can override any title and set any META description and any META keywords you want.
• You can fine-tune everything
• Backward-Compatibility with many other plugins, like Auto Meta, Ultimate Tag Warrior and others.

Current version 1.4.5.9 updated on 2008-2-17.

Click here to stay updated with the latest version.

Popularity: 3% [?]

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.

Popularity: 4% [?]