The busy (mt) ninjas have updated our one-click WordPress install to 2.2 on the Grid. This looks to be a significant upgrade…You can learn more about it straight from Matt right here.

Now, if you already have WordPress installed on your Grid account, Do not(!) use the one-click installer to upgrade your current version of WordPress. It will break your blog and erase all of your hard work. WordPress has a good 5 step walkthrough on upgrading here.

Last but not least, (mt) would also like to send a special thanks to Matt Mullenweg and the entire WP team for all of their hard work. Congrats!

The Zend Optimizer and both versions of PHP on the Grid have been updated today, the new versions are:

• PHP 4.4.7-1
• PHP 5.2.2-1
• Zend Optimizer 3.2.8

These versions have been thoroughly tested to work on the Grid. In addition to these upgrades we have preinstalled all Pear modules marked ’stable’.  If customers want to specify other versions of PHP for application compatibility they should consult our Knowledge Base article.

We have received many reports of customers that would like the default character set of PostgreSQL databases set to UTF-8.  Many applications require this character set so we have made it the default character set on all newly created PostgreSQL databases.

Some rails apps were failing to restart after a crash due to a number of reasons including stale mongrel.pid files. We have implemented new logic in the application restart scripts which will account for this issue so applications should be restarting cleanly from now on.

(mt) Developers have been working hard on adding a scheduling feature to the backup tool available in the Account Center.  The new functionality is now available, customers can schedule weekly or monthly automatic backups of all of their data.

Included in the roll out of GMR v.1.2 was a new load balancing technology which should mitigate all of the FTP time out issues customers were reporting. Newly installed and configured load balancers use some techniques to direct users to underloaded parts of the grid and will keep better track of which users have active connections.