WordPress 2.9

Another chic WordPress release.   One of the reasons I trust WordPress to store my writing (which is rare and precious these days) is the huge community that supports it.  Fortunately, the days of a lone geek in his mama’s basement are long past for WordPress.   In this release there were over 400¹ contributors!

So, to the new goodies in this version:

• image editor in the media module (as in you can crop, flip, and rotate the images)
• easier media enclosures (youtube plugins are a thing of the past²)
• a trash bin for your deleted posts (you can restore them from the ‘trash’ tab in the Posts Panel>>Edit subPanel, although the trash bin will only show after you’ve deleted something)
• batch updating of plugins – I’m so glad to have this now!  I have 31 plugins on this site, and now I can update them all with one click!!  (this is found in the Tools Panel >> Upgrade subPanel)
• Attn: BlogHer Users: We can now set a custom theme directory – this means that all of you that have a separate blog for your reviews, can now use the same theme as the main site – no copying and pasting or doubling up on your changes for every single tweak!
• 3 tools that I didn’t know needed improvement – now even better: photo galleries (you can choose ANY image in the blog now); bookmarklet (yay!); and the sidebars now show descriptions – what a relief for those of us with 15 “text” widgets and try to guess which is which.

Other good things to explore – and possibly heavy on the geekery:

• SEO advancement: rel=canonical option
• Database optimization – now supported through the wp-config file
• Theme Support – is now a whole lot better with automatic thumbnail support for posts, metadata tables that are customizable for comments, more support for editing users, profiles, post types, and registration.  Can you see how incredibly versatile this makes WP?
• Custom category templates by slug.  Better support for custom wp-queries, and query-posts, excerpts and taxonomies.  And last but definitely not least – the theme editor will now remember your place after a save! Woot!   (but remember – never use the editor – use a text editor so you can undo your changes!)  lol
• Exports and Backups will now remember custom taxonomies.

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^{1, 2} More information available at http://wordpress.org/development/2009/12/wordpress-2-9/