The folks at Automattic today released WordPress 2.6.3 which is a minor security patch to the Snoopy script they use for displaying rss feeds in the admin area.  Not an utterly crucial upgrade, but one you might want to take just to be sure your secure.  The upgrade took me 5 minutes using the auto upgrade plugin.

One issue that I noticed while using the auto upgrade plugin, which was also upgraded, was that the script failed repeatedly on the database backup step.  I was forced to skip that step (I used the database backup plugin to grab one).  If you find you have the same issue, you may want to skip that step as well.  Just be sure to get a db backup (and you should be getting those weekly!).

Now’s probably a good time to mention that we’ve got another major WordPress Upgrade on the way, 2.7, which should be here in November.  Again, there will be major changes in the Admin area as they clean it up even more and make it more useful for us.  For an overview of the new Admin UI, have a look here.

So what’s the 2.7 upgrade mean to you?  Basically it’s going to provide a more logically oriented admin area, and one in which we’ll better be able to build upon into the future.  As I’ve said before, WordPress is not longer just blog software, it has become a full fledged open source content management package, and this is yet another move in that direction.

On another front, Automattic will also be releasing the 1.0 level version of BBPress, their forum package which provides tight integration with WordPress. I’m particularly interested in this package, as I work with BBPress on almost a daily basis, but honestly, the feature list doesn’t even approach that of vBulletin or even Simple Machines.  Still, I’m hopeful for a vast improvement over the 0.9 code stream.