WordPress is actively being developed by great developers. I always tried to keep my WordPress installation updated by running update process — which is very easy. But, right now, I want to write down about the latest release. Not that every update provides an improvement, new features, or bug fixes, but this version 3.7 (codename: Basie) has few good things offered.
The first useful feature is the background updates. It means that you do not need to worry about having an outdated installation when a new release is available. So, if your self-hosted WordPress-powered blog is not yet upgraded to 3.7, it’s a perfect time.

Having an automatic upgrade is good, it’s a worry-free situation. Of course, there might be some bugs or features that you will not be familiar with. But for me, having everything updated is a good thing. If you’re using some plugins, they might not compatible with the latest updates. Not always, but it might happen. Since I don’t have critical plugins installed, having some broken plugins should not be an issue. I just simply disabled them.

How to turn off automatic updates?

You can, but you have to maintain your updates. Or, if you don’t care about this updates (or worse, you don’t care about your blog), you can just ignore it. The easiest solution to disable the core updates is by modifying your wp-config.php file. It’s located at the main root directory. Add these following lines:

# Disables all core updates:
define( 'WP_AUTO_UPDATE_CORE', false );
# Enables all core updates, including minor and major:
define( 'WP_AUTO_UPDATE_CORE', true );
# Enables core updates for minor releases (default):
define( 'WP_AUTO_UPDATE_CORE', 'minor' );

If you want to for some details, go to Make WordPress Core website.
Some others features introduced in this updates includes the password strength checker. Do you always have a not-easy-to-guess password? The other one is about a better search. Since I’m maintaining some WordPress-powered sites, I think I will update them all right now.