WordPress 2.9 Released into the Wild

Seeing as I’m now running both CodeUnit and Rugged Rock off the WordPress platform, I guess it is about time that I take notice every time WordPress breathes, and thus it comes as no surprise that this post is in honour of WordPress’ latest and greatest release, WordPress 2.9 Carmen, nicknamed such in honour of jazz vocalist Carmen McRae – who I don’t actually know a thing about.

WordPress 2.9 on the other hand I do know something about.

The latest major release of this ever popular open source blogging platform sees the introduction of some useful new features, in particular the addition of an integrated image editing tool as well as a global undo feature that amongst other things, allows the user to restore previously deleted posts.

Since the release of version 2.8 back in June this year, the developer team has set about closing over 500 reports in the project’s bug tracking system, making this latest version one of the most stable releases to hit the ground running (that is, if you ignore the scheduled posts failing that I chronicled the fix for yesterday). The new version also adds support for bulk plugin updating and better media handling, for example, if you place a video URL in a post WordPress now automatically generates the markup that is needed to display the video in an embedded player (works for YouTube, Flickr and Hulu to name a few). The WYSIWYG editor has been upgraded, the “Press This” bookmarklet has been improved and apparently the XML-RPC API has been ‘suped up a bit as well.

Obviously, the release notes are a good place to get a better handle on all the new features and system changes in place and if you still haven’t converted to the almost de facto standard in blogging platforms, you can download WordPress from the official site.

Have fun! :)