WordPress 2.9 has just been released. Named “Carmen” in honor of jazz singer Carmen McRae, it offers plenty new features, some of them are:

- Global undo/”trash”.
It allows you to undo a post or a comment deletion. It also eliminates “Are you sure?” message that usually appeared on every deletion.

- Built-in image editor
It allows you to crop, edit, rotate, flip and scale your images.

- Batch plugin update and compatibility checking
It allows you to update 10 plugins at once. No need to check each one as with the previous WordPress 2.8. The new compatibility data from the plugins directory allows you to recognize instantly whether your plugins are compatible with new WordPress releases.

- Easier video embed
It allows you to paste a URL on its own line, with Oembed support for YouTube, Daily Motion, Blip.tv, Flickr, Hulu, Viddler, Qik, Revision3, Scribd, Google Video, Photobucket, PollDaddy, WordPress.tv and more in the next release.

Other improvements come along with WordPress 2.9, as these:
- Rel=canonical support for better SEO.
- Automatic database optimization support, which you can enable in your wp-config.php file by adding define(‘WP_ALLOW_REPAIR’, true);.
- Themes can register “post thumbnails” which allow them to attach an image to the post.
- A new commentmeta table that allows arbitrary key/value pairs to be attached to comments, just like posts.
- Custom post types have been upgraded with better API support so you can juggle more types than just post, page and attachment.
- You can set custom theme directories so a plugin can register a theme to be bundled with it or you can have multiple shared theme directories on your server.
- Upgraded TinyMCE WYSIWYG editing and Simplepie.
- Sidebars can now have descriptions.
- Specify category templates not just by ID, but by slug.
- Registration and profiles are now extensible so you can collect things more easily.
- The XML-RPC API has been extended to allow changing the user registration option. Atom API attachment issues are fixed as well.
- Create custom galleries with the new include and exclude attributes that allow you to pull attachments from any post, not just the current one.
- When you’re editing files in the theme and plugin editors it remembers your location and takes you back to that line after you save.
- The Press This bookmarklet has been improved and is faster than ever.
- Custom taxonomies are now included in the WXR export file and imported correctly.
- Better hooks and filters for excerpts, smilies, HTTP requests, user profiles, author links, taxonomies, SSL support, tag clouds, query_posts and WP_Query.

To upgrade your WordPress into WordPress 2.9, you can do it from Dashboard by going to Tools > Upgrade. Or, you can download it here. Make sure you backup your site before upgrading anything.

WordPress has been a remarkably large community, with millions of WordPress warriors using its blogging platform. Ever wonder who they are, or where they are?

You can stop wondering now. Meet WordPress Worldmap. It is a site where you can locate other WordPress warriors, and get to know each other after.

Oh yeah. You, too, can join them. Just visit the site, drag around the red marker to specify your location.

You will need to submit some information about yourself, as your name, your company, your twitter username as well as your WP.org and WP.com usernames. Welcome aboard, WordPress Warrior!

A few of new features included in WordPress 2.9 Beta 2:

For Developers
- Comments meta table
- Improved support for custom post types
- register_theme-directory() for additional theme locations
- back-ported JSON encode/decode for both PHP and JavaScript

For Users
- oEmbed support
- “Trash” for posts, pages and comments
- Post thumbnails support
- Basic image editor

Here is to see all changes since Beta 1 version.

The latest updated version of WordPress for iPhone is available for download on the App Store. It is WordPress for iPhone 2.1.

Update your app and enjoy such features as:
- A post or page can be deleted by swiping across its title in the Posts or Pages list
- Commenter email addresses are now visible
- The app now supports HTTP authentication for password-protected self-hosted blogs
- Fix for link helper not working in mid-sentence
- Fix for lost content after changing status of post containing a tag
- Fix for visual glitch with buttons in Comments section
- Fix for problem recognizing valid URLs during set up

Thousands of WordPress translators from round the globe have been participating in the full translation of WordPress.com. They have been working so hard to make WordPress.com available in more than 60 languages. Any text on dashboard, widgets and most themes can be shown in one of the supported languages by modifying it through the Language Settings.

Before the platform used for translation had been so simple that the approval and deploy process might be slow at times. Now, WordPress.com translators are provided a new, improved platform that they can do their jobs easier. The new platform is GlotPress.

Most important changes due to the GlotPress usage:
- Filters for everything
- Pagination; no more filtering through thousands of strings
- Faster, optimized process of string validation and deployment
- Adding new languages is easier to do

However, some features that GlotPress is supposed to have as keyboard shortcuts and social functions (user profiles, comments, tags) are disabled. Automattic leaves them behind because the urge of having better system for translation that they focus on most important features only. In the future those features will be enabled.

Anyone can be a WordPress.com translator, with translations to be approved by Automattic team first. Now, with GlotPress coming on board, WordPress.com supports “validator” profiles on GlotPress, for those who want to help out in semantics and consistency validation.

For about 10 most spoken languages, WordPress.com imports those language communities’ translations directly, overwriting existing strings, at every new release. Anyone who wants to contribute particular idioms can get in touch with the .org translators.

As for programmers, WordPress.com welcome them all to contribute to the GlotPress code with patches and additions.

For How-To videos, there are plenty of categories you can find in the site created by Automattic, as following:
- Admin
- Akismet
- bbPress
- Blog Management
- Blogging Tools
- BuddyPress
- Design
- Development
- Discussion
- e-Commerce
- Gravatar
- Importing
- Installation
- Integration
- IntenseDebate
- Media
- Mobile
- Organizing
- Plugins
- Publishing
- SEO
- Set-Up
- Themes
- Users
- Widgets
- WordPress.TV
- Writing

Everyone with great enthusiasm towards WordPress most likely shares his knowledge and experience of using WordPress as a blog platform. Thus you can find plenty of useful information, some of them are simple step by steps so easy to follow.

Check WordPress.TV out if you face an issue with WordPress, or if you just wanna share something about it. After all, sharing is caring.

Automattic founder and CEO Matt Mullenweg chose to use Azure for distributed hosting for WordPress and the millions of blogs its customers have online, after all these years of using Open Source technology.

Mullenweg has built WordPress to run on Linux as its operating system, MySQL as its database and Apache Web as its server. But now he has decided to take a huge turn, to the cloud-computing Windows Azure developed by Microsoft.
Microsoft is going to have Azure live in January 2010. During the whole month WordPress can preview it for free. Afterwards it is on sale.

As stated by Microsoft CTO Ray Ozzie at the Microsoft Professional Developers Conference on Tuesday, Azure will allow their customers to write code on a cloud-based operating system that runs in Microsoft data center.

OddlySpecific.com has used WordPress for its front-end content management, and now begins to use Azure on the back-end. If it gets popular as viral sites used to be, Azure specifications can be modified instantaneously to deal with increased traffic.

A business blog Daily Finance notes that WordPress using Azure as its hosting is somewhat quizzical. Whether it is a good business decision for Automattic and WordPress, we all can just wait and see.

Plugin is one of most important elements of WordPress. Finding the best plugins for your WordPress may be quite a challenge. Or not. Being launched today, WP Plugins may become your saviour.

WP Plugins is an app store for WordPress plugins. Here developers can upload and sell their premium WordPress plugins, at whatever prices they choose.

There are two methods of transaction. Users can download plugins offered by publishers, limited for 7 days. Or, with additional price, users can subscribe and download the plugins; this way they can get upgrades and support as long as they resume the subscription.

WP Plugins gain 10% share of each plugin sale.

To join WP Plugins, plugin developers need to register and upload the plugins. A team of WordPress experts from Inscub will then review the plugins. Once they are approved, they are up on the online shelves for sale.

WordPress is no longer a simple blog platform. It has now been highly acclaimed in the CMS market, after being awarded the Best Overall Open Source CMS, a top prize in 2009 Open Source CMS Awards.

Here is the official announcement:

We are pleased to announce that Wordpress has won the Overall Best Open Source CMS Award in the 2009 Open Source CMS Awards. WordPress has won this Award for the first time in the past four years, earning itself a place in the Hall of Fame category for the Award next year.

Let’s redo the success story of WordCamp Indonesia 2009. Next year, Jan 30, if you ever call yourself a WordPress enthusiast, come and join us in WordCamp Indonesia 2010. Let’s meet and share all you know about WordPress. It is going to be awesome!

In this 2nd WordCamp Indonesia, Beau Lebens is scheduled to be one of speakers appear on stage. Growing up in a tiny town in rural Western Australia, Beau has made himself into a well-known online brand since the early days of internet. After 10 years of development work in various companies and freelancing, he now joins Automattic.

WordCamp Indonesia 2010 is to be held in Gunadarma University, Depok, by Valent Mustamin. Possible sessions during WordCamp Indonesia 2010:

- Authoring – Google SEO

- Podcasting with WordPress TV

- State of the Word

- Community

- Media-related (Print, TV, Radio)

- Showcasing a WordPress.org Showcase

- WordPress Developers

- User-Generated Content

- Browser/OS

- Cloud Powered WordPress

- Content Management System / Benchmarking

- Intense Debate, BBPress, BuddyPress, WordPress MU

- Themes, Plugins, Framework, Codex

- Localization

- Copyright and Content Online

- WordPress Security

- Social Media

- Hosting, Database and Infrastructure