Version 2.3 of WordPress (named Dexter) is now ready. The latest release includes some impressive enhancements which fully support the social shift currently happening and an important URL handling improvement.

From the official announcement: "The entire team is really proud of this release, and I’m happy that this is our second on-time release under our new development schedule. The grand experiment of a more agile WordPress with significant features in the hands of users more often is working."

New key WordPress 2.3 features include:

- Native tagging support: This allows bloggers to use tags in addition to categories on posts. 2.3 also includes importers for popular plugins such as the Ultimate Tag Warrior, Jerome's Keywords, Simple Tags, and Bunny's Technorati Tags.

- New updated notification: This lets bloggers know when a new release of WordPress or when any plugins has an update available. The feature works by interacting with Wordpress new API service which compares loaded plugins with the current plugin database.

- Canonical URLs: This feature cleans up those messy URLs by enforcing your no-www preference, redirect posts with chanced slugs so a link never goes bad, redirects URLs that get cut off and much more. In the end, it could help overall SEO efforts. - Pending review: Perfect for multi-author blogs, authors may submit a post for review by an editor or administrator - before authors were forced to save a draft and notify editors manually that a draft was in the que.