WordPress Development Team member Matt Mullenweg announced that WordPress 2.0.6 has been released. If you do visit his blog at photomatt.com, do note that he’s currently posted photo montages of Shinjuku cosplayers (which will eat up your bandwidth like nobody’s business if you’re still hit by the Taiwan Earthquake bandwidth bottleneck).

Significant in this WordPress release is a patch for a security hole. Though I think the security issue was blown out of proportion by some bloggers (SecurityBait?), it’s good to upgrade your blog to the latest version.

Among the changes:

• The aforementioned security fixes.
• HTML quicktags now work in Safari browsers.
• Comments are filtered to prevent them from messing up your blog layout.
• Compatibility with PHP/FastCGI setups.

Before you patch your WordPress blog, I’d recommend the following:

• Backup your MySQL database
• Read the WordPress codex on restoring a backup in case things go south
• Keep your fingers crossed

The documentation says this is a stable release, so things should go smoothly.

If you’re interested in being a beta tester for the next major WordPress release (Version 2.1), you can sign up at http://wordpress.org/download/beta/.

But unless you’re a full time blogger, you’d probably get more leverage focusing on your SEO, SEM, product creation or affiliate marketing activities.