Wordpress 2.6.1 is out of beta and has been released to the public as a full download. Those of you running Wordpress 2.6 on your own hosting should have seen the admin status message over the weekend revealing the availability of the next version of Wordpress.

To upgrade, simply grab a copy of the latest release and FTP it to your server, replacing the existing Wordpress files. If you’re in doubt about plugin compatibility, a helpful suggestion is to disable each active plugin on your blog BEFORE running the update.

When you have everything uploaded, simply go to www.yourdomain.com/wp-admin/upgrade.php to call the upgrade script (where yourdomain.com is your actual domain name).

From the Wordpress blog…

With 2.6.1, we’re continuing our trend of releasing a maintenance release shortly after a major release in order to get fixes for the inevitable “dot zero” bugs into your hands without a long wait. If you’re happy with 2.6, however, keep on using it. You need not upgrade to 2.6.1 if 2.6 is getting the job done.

2.6.1 offers several improvements for international users. Styling of the admin for right-to-left languages is much improved thanks to the efforts of the Farsi and Hebrew translation teams, and a mysterious gettext bug caused by certain PHP configurations is now fixed. For IIS users, 2.6.1 fixes several permalink problems. Image insertion problems in the Press This feature experienced by IE users are also fixed. Of note to everyone is a fix for a performance bug in the admin where those with a lot of plugins would experience slowness on some pages.

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