Wordpress 2.1 Released

Wordpress 2.1 has been released. Some of the new features may be attractive but, as usual, you should check that plugins etc., are compatible before upgrading. A plugin compatibility checklist is available as part of the documentation project. According to the documentation most of the more popular plugins will work fine. So what's new?

1. Autosave - handy if you're writing longer posts directly on the web interface and don't save your work.
2. Database improvements - this should be interesting to see in a shared environment, though most of the issues people encounter stem from badly written plugins that use inefficient SQL. Do you really need over 100 queries to generate a page? :)
3. Lots of AJAX - hopefully this brings improvement and not just feature creep
4. Pseudo-cron - sounds like they've brought the plugin into the core

They've also decided to put a development plan in place:

More exciting for most of our users, though, is our new development cycle. Based on everything we’ve learned in the past 3 years of doing WordPress, we’ve decided to shift to a more frequent release schedule like Ubuntu, with major releases coming several times a year. So, for the first time in WordPress’ history, I have an answer to when the next version is coming out: April 23rd.

So, should you upgrade? As this release is not a security fix there's probably no reason for you to upgrade unless you actually want to. If you have a working setup that you are happy with, why would you want to break it? I will probably upgrade when I get the time, but I'm in no rush.