On the official blog of WordPress the new version of WordPress is downloadable from today. Where Matt explain about this Releases more .
I want to make you mine, all the time… oh wait. Hello. I’m here on
behalf of the entire WordPress development team and community to
announce the immediate availability of WordPress version 2.9 “Carmen” named in honor of magical jazz vocalist Carmen McRae (whom we’ve added to our Last.fm WP release station). You can upgrade easily from your Dashboard by going to Tools > Upgrade, or you can download from WordPress.org or techarena.in
The coolest new stuff from a user point of view is:
- Global undo/”trash” feature, which means that if
you accidentally delete a post or comment you can bring it back from
the grave (i.e., the Trash). This also eliminates those annoying “are
you sure” messages we used to have on every delete. - Built-in image editor allows you to crop, edit,
rotate, flip, and scale your images to show them who’s boss. This is
the first wave of our many planned media-handling improvements. - Batch plugin update and compatibility checking,
which means you can update 10 plugins at once, versus having to do
multiple clicks for each one, and we’re using the new compatibility
data from the plugins directory to give you a better idea of whether
your plugins are compatible with new releases of WordPress. This should
take the fear and hassle out of upgrading. - Easier video embeds
that allow you to just paste a URL on its own line and have it
magically turn it into the proper embed code, with Oembed support for
YouTube, Daily Motion, Blip.tv, Flickr, Hulu, Viddler, Qik, Revision3,
Scribd, Google Video, Photobucket, PollDaddy, and WordPress.tv (and
more in the next release).
2.9 provides the smoothest ride yet because of a number of
improvements under the hood and more subtle improvements you’ll begin
to appreciate once you’ve been around the block a few times. Here’s
just a sampling:
- We now have rel=canonical support for better SEO.
- There is 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, especially useful for magazine-style themes. - A new commentmeta table that allows arbitrary
key/value pairs to be attached to comments, just like posts, so you can
now expand greatly what you can do in the comment framework. - Custom post types have been upgraded with better API support so you
can juggle more types than just post, page, and attachment. (More of
this planned for 3.0.) - 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. - We’ve upgraded TinyMCE WYSIWYG editing and Simplepie.
- Sidebars can now have descriptions so it’s more obvious what and where they do what they do.
- Specify category templates not just by ID, like before, but by
slug, which will make it easier for theme developers to do custom
things with categories — like post types! - Registration and profiles are now extensible to allow you to
collect things more easily, like a user’s Twitter account or any other
fields you can imagine. - The XML-RPC API has been extended to allow changing the user registration option. We fixed some Atom API attachment issues.
- 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.
(Thank goodness!!!) - The Press This bookmarklet has been improved and is faster than
ever; give it a try for on-the-fly blogging from wherever you are on
the internet. - 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
