WordPress 2.9 is Out! News

WordPress 2.9 is Out!

December 18, 2009  /  admin  /    0

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.