It’s just been couple of weeks or so since the WordPress 2.8 is released. If you are in touch with developers community then you must be aware it had certain theme related issues esp., when Certain themes were calling get_categories() function. Here is brief overview of the changes made in 2.8.1 Beta 1 as noted on the WordPress development Blog
- Certain themes were calling get_categories() in such a way that it would fail in 2.8. 2.8.1 works around this so these themes won’t have to change.
- Dashboard memory usage is reduced. Some people were running out of memory when loading the dashboard, resulting in an incomplete page.
- The automatic upgrade no longer accidentally deletes files when cleaning up from a failed upgrade.
- A problem where the rich text editor wasn’t being loaded due to compression issues has been worked around.
- Extra security has been put in place to better protect you from plugins that do not do explicit permission checks.
If you want to get your hands dirty with testing of this beta release then you can download the nightly build here with complete instructions. I know most of the developers do download the nightly build for testing and helping the bug fixing.