The Dexter (named after great tenor Dexter Gordon) edition of WordPress 2.3 has been released on time as scheduled after testing on RC1 few days ago. The new milestone in WordPress blog publishing software spotted a few major features and a lot of bug fixes to make WordPress 2.3 a more perfect software.

According to WordPress development blog, some of the major features and enhancements in WordPress version 2.3 include:

  • Native tagging support where a tag entry field below the editor appears on Write and Edit post to allows users to use tags in addition to categories on your post, if you so choose. Importers for the Ultimate Tag Warrior, Jerome’s Keywords, Simple Tags, and Bunny’s Technorati Tag plugins are included.

    WordPress Tags

    WordPress Tags

  • 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 what the latest and greatest is you can use.

    WordPress Update Notification

    WordPress Plugins Update Notification

  • Pretty URL handling improvement 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.
  • 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.

    WordPress Pending Review

  • New advanced WYSIWYG functionality (we call it the kitchen sink button) that allows you to access some features of TinyMCE that were previously hidden.

    WordPress Advanced TinyMCE

  • Improved post and draft management where “Manage ->” Posts you can filter by search term, post type (draft, private, scheduled for future publishing, or published), author, month published, and category. You can also combine any or all of those filters and do them all at once.

    WordPress Filters

  • Full and complete Atom 1.0 support, including the publishing protocol.

Download latest version of WordPress. As WordPress 2.3 involves considerable database structure changes, so it’s important to ensure that your plugins installed are working in the new released. Plugins compatibility list for WP 2.3 is a great starting point.

Update: Download WordPress 2.3.1 or WordPress 2.5 final.