BlogsWeek.com

WordPress 2.3 is a much awaited release including many new features. The most significant are native tagging support, WP and plugin update notification, and URL handling improvements.

Native tagging support allows you to use tags in addition to categories on your posts, while 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 whats the latest and greatest you can use.”

There are also many new features for developers, e.g. full Atom 1.0 support, use of the new jQuery, and new hooks and filters to override things like the update system, the dashboard RSS feeds, or the feed parser.

For full details, please refer to the release announcement by Matt Mullenweg.