Last June 11 2009, WordPress release 2.8 codename "Baker." 2.8 represents a nice fit and finish release for WordPress with improvements to themes, widgets, taxonomies, and overall speed. They also fixed over 790 bugs. This release is named in honor of noted trumpeter and vocalist Chet Baker.

After updating your site to the latest version of WordPress, download the first maintenance release to 2.8. 2.8.1 will fix a handful of bugs that turned up in 2.8. Here are some of the notable issues that are fixed in beta 1.

• Certain themes were calling get_categories() in such a way that it would fail in 2.8. 2.8.1 works around this so these themes won’t have to change.
• Dashboard memory usage is reduced. Some people were running out of memory when loading the dashboard, resulting in an incomplete page.
• The automatic upgrade no longer accidentally deletes files when cleaning up from a failed upgrade.
• A problem where the rich text editor wasn’t being loaded due to compression issues has been worked around.
• Extra security has been put in place to better protect you from plugins that do not do explicit permission checks.