WordPress Release Cycles
A new version of WordPress is released about three times per year, despite the fact that the WordPress development community is made up of primarily volunteer developers who donate their time and talents to the WordPress platform.
Why you need to upgrade WordPress regularly
Don’t get discouraged by how many times you need to upgrade your WordPress installation in a year. With each new upgrade, you find improved security and new features that you can use to improve the experience on your website.
Here are some reasons why upgrading your WordPress installation is important and something every WordPress website owner needs to do every time a new version releases.
Security: As WordPress versions come and go, outdated versions are no longer supported and are the most vulnerable to malicious attacks and hacker attempts. If you’ve heard anything negative about WordPress security, 99.99 percent of the time, it’s because the users were running an outdated version on their websites. To make sure you have the most up-to-date and secure version running, upgrade to the latest version as soon you can.
New features: With major WordPress releases, you always find great new features that boost your efficiency and productivity in maintaining your website or improve your visitors’ experience — or both. Upgrading your WordPress installation makes sure you always have access to the latest and greatest tools and features that WordPress has to offer.
Plugins and themes: Most plugin and theme developers work hard to make sure their products are up to date and compatible with the latest WordPress version. Therefore, plugin and theme developers generally don’t worry about backward compatibility, or working with out-of-date WordPress versions, because keeping their product relevant to the current WordPress version is challenging enough.
To be sure that the plugins and themes you use are current and don’t break any of the features on your site (for example, they stop working or cause errors), make sure you use the latest WordPress version and the latest version of your chosen plugins and themes.
Review release cycles
By the time you upgrade your WordPress installation to the latest version, that version has gone through several iterations, or versions, before it landed in your hands.
Alpha: This is the first phase of the new version, typically the idea phase where developers gather ideas from one another, from users, and from community members. After features are decided, developers develop and testers test until they reach the feature freeze — the point in the development cycle when all new features are considered complete and the development moves on to the beta cycle.
Beta: This cycle is in place to fix bugs and any problems that are reported by testers. Beta cycles can last up to 4–6 weeks, if not more, and many times, WordPress releases several beta versions that look something like WordPress version 3.0 Beta, WordPress version 3.0 Beta 1, and so on.
This continues until the development team decides that the software is ready to move into the next phase of the development cycle.
Release candidate (RC): A version is released as a release candidate when it’s been determined that the bugs from the beta versions have been fixed and the version is almost ready for the final release. You can sometimes see several iterations referred to as RC-1, RC-2, and so on.
Final release: When a version has gone through full testing in several (hopefully all) types of environments (browser systems, different web server configurations, and so on) and user experiences and no major bugs are reported and all bugs from the alpha, beta, and RC phases have been squashed, the development team releases the final version of the WordPress software.
After a version is released as a final release, the WordPress development team starts all over again in the alpha phase, gearing up to go through the development cycle again, ready for the next major version.
Major versus point releases
Notice that WordPress versions are numbered. These numbers show the progress of the development of the software, but the numbers are also software versioning, which is a method of assigning unique numbers to each version release.
Point release: Point releases are relatively minor releases and includes things like minor bug fixes. For example, when the version number jumps from 3.0 to 3.0.1, you can be pretty certain that the new version (3.0.1) was released to fix existing minor bugs or clean ups to the source code, rather than to add new features.
Major release: A major release most often contains new features, and you generally see a large jump in version numbers. For example, when WordPress went from 2.9 to 3.0, it was considered a major release because it jumped a whole number, rather than incrementally increasing by decimal points (although version 2.9 did get versioned into 2.9.1 and 2.9.2 before it jumped to 3.0).
This large jump is a sign that this version includes a few new features, rather than just bug fixes or code cleanup. The bigger the jump in version number, the more major the release is considered to be. For example, if it suddenly jumped from 3.0 to 3.5, that would be an indication of some pretty major new features in that release.

Blogging & Social Networking Glossary
archive
1. (noun) A list of previous blog posts, in chronological order. 2. (verb) To place files or blog posts in a safer place (on DVD or another server) for longer-term or backup storage.

Blogging & Social Networking Glossary
attribute
Used in an HTML tag to give an instruction to a Web browser. For example, in This link goes to <a href="http://www.google.com">Google</a>, the <a> tag gets an attribute (href) and a value ("http://www.google.com") to go along with the basic tag. In this case, the attribute indicates to the browser that what comes next is a hypertext reference — in this case, a Web page.

Blogging & Social Networking Glossary
blacklist
An often-centralized list of e-mail addresses, URLs, and IP addresses used by spammers that are then forbidden in any blog post on your blog. With an up-to-date blacklist, a lot of spam is stopped before it becomes a comment.

Blogging & Social Networking Glossary
block
To stop all contact with a MySpace user. He can’t comment on your blog page or send you any message that you actually receive.

Blogging & Social Networking Glossary
blog
A combination of the words Web and log. Bloggers (individuals, groups, or businesses) post a chronological log of information. Content is determined entirely by the author(s) of the blog; many are personal journals.

Blogging & Social Networking Glossary
blog post
An entry in a blog, possibly containing text, images, and other media.

Blogging & Social Networking Glossary
blogger
The author of a blog.

Blogging & Social Networking Glossary
blogging policy
Outlines what you’re allowed to post in your blog.

Blogging & Social Networking Glossary
blogging software
Technology that enables you to blog. Can be either hosted or nonhosted.

Blogging & Social Networking Glossary
blogroll
A collection of links used or recommended by a blogger.

Blogging & Social Networking Glossary
cookie
A short piece of computer code, stored on your computer, that enables Web sites to remember certain settings and information the next time you visit that site.

Blogging & Social Networking Glossary
Dashboard
A kind of control panel in Blogger that shows you the blogs you’ve set up, giving you access posting, using help resources, or even creating another blog.

Blogging & Social Networking Glossary
definition list
A type of HTML list that gives a term and then its definition and has built-in spacing to lay out those elements properly.

Blogging & Social Networking Glossary
disk space
Amount of room available on your hard drive.

Blogging & Social Networking Glossary
domain
A domain is the address, or main URL, that people type in the browser to get to your Web site. The domain name you choose can’t be used by anyone else.

Blogging & Social Networking Glossary
domain registrar
A service that enables you to register a domain name.

Blogging & Social Networking Glossary
entry
An single posting in a blog containing text, images, or other media, or any combination of those things.

Blogging & Social Networking Glossary
Facebook
A social-networking service that enables you to keep in contact with families and friends via the Web.

Blogging & Social Networking Glossary
Flickr
A Web site that allows you to share, organize, edit, and otherwise manage your photos.

Blogging & Social Networking Glossary
Friend List
Your virtual online address book in MySpace. You can become someone’s friend by either sending a fellow MySpacer a Friend Request or by being on the receiving end of a Friend Request from another MySpace user.

Blogging & Social Networking Glossary
hosted services
Manages the data, software, and Web hosting of a blog; the blogger just manages the content.

Blogging & Social Networking Glossary
HTML
The computer coding used by Web designers to create Web pages.

Blogging & Social Networking Glossary
hyperlink
A navigation tool that allows a user to go from one Web location to another by clicking. Hyperinks (or just links) are typically underlined.

Blogging & Social Networking Glossary
hypertext reference
In HTML, the address that a hyperlink connects to when clicked. For example, in This link goes to <a href="http://www.google.com">Google</a>, the hypertext reference (href) is http://www.google.com. Hyperlink references can also jump to new positions on the same page, open a new e-mail message, or begin a file download.

Blogging & Social Networking Glossary
link
Short for hyperlink, a navigation tool that allows a user to go from one Web location to another by clicking. Links are typically underlined.

Blogging & Social Networking Glossary
Mom test
A self-test that flags inappropriate blog posts. If you’d let your mom read the post, then it’s probably passed the Mom test. Specifically, don’t blog about topics you think will hurt others; don’t blog about others without their permission, even about topics you consider inconsequential; and don’t identify friends and lovers by name without their permission.

Blogging & Social Networking Glossary
MySpace
A social-networking service that enables you to keep in contact with families and friends via the Web.

Blogging & Social Networking Glossary
MySpace profile
Your MySpace identity. It can contain as much or as little information about you as you’d like.

Blogging & Social Networking Glossary
news aggregation
The ability to aggregate news by using RSS feeds. Having a news aggregator included with your blog package allows your site to pull in information from another blog.

Blogging & Social Networking Glossary
nonhosted service
Blog software that you set up on your own Web server. It allows you to take on all responsibilities related to maintaining your blog.

Blogging & Social Networking Glossary
ordered list
Contains items that must be listed in a particular order, such as a list of ranks or preferences. It may also indicate a list of steps for the reader to follow.

Blogging & Social Networking Glossary
pinging
An automated notification system for search engines and newsreaders, letting those services know that your blog has been updated. A ping occurs when one computer asks another whether it’s there; the second computer confirms its presence.

Blogging & Social Networking Glossary
post
1. (noun) An entry in a blog containing text, images, other media, or any combination of these. 2. (verb) The act of creating and/or uploading a blog entry.

Blogging & Social Networking Glossary
private profile
A MySpace profile that’s limited on who can view it, such as only people on your Friend List.

Blogging & Social Networking Glossary
public domain
The status of publications, processes, and product designs that are free from copyrights and/or patents and are available for anyone's use.

Blogging & Social Networking Glossary
social network
A service, such as Facebook or MySpace, that enables to keep in touch with people you know — and meet people you don’t know.

Blogging & Social Networking Glossary
spam
Unsolicited electronic messages sent in bulk that may be commercial, nonsensical, or malicious. In addition to e-mail spam, blog comments and blog forums can be targeted by spammers.

Blogging & Social Networking Glossary
tag
A relevant keyword associated or assigned to a piece of information, such as an image, a blog entry, or a video clip. Tags are usually chosen informally by the content creator or by the online community; they help give content to nontext media and organize information for ease of searching.

Blogging & Social Networking Glossary
Trackback
A technology that tracks references to a blog posting that occurs on other blogs. They allow bloggers to link to blog posts on related topics.

Blogging & Social Networking Glossary
transparent
1. Being honest and truthful on your blog. Also means that you admit mistakes and engage in dialogue with readers who leave comments. Considered proper blogging etiquette. 2. Integration of applications, programs, and media from different sources in such a way that the end user is unaware that the content is not self-contained.

Blogging & Social Networking Glossary
unordered list
unordered list is a series of bulleted items and is used for lists that don’t require numbering.

Blogging & Social Networking Glossary
video blog
A blog consisting of video files, or the practice of placing a video file in a blog post.

Blogging & Social Networking Glossary
video-sharing service
A service, such as YouTube, that enables you to share video with others.

Blogging & Social Networking Glossary
Web host
The Web server where you software, graphics, and other files live online.

Blogging & Social Networking Glossary
Web server
Technology that looks at what Web page is requested and then feeds the browser the appropriate file. It does most of the hard work of serving Web pages to visitors coming to your Web site.

Blogging & Social Networking Glossary
whitelist
A list of preselected users who are allowed to comment on your blog.

Blogging & Social Networking Glossary
YouTube
A video-sharing service.