If you haven’t already noticed, WordPress 2.9 is out with some pretty nice features – kinda hard to miss these days since you get that big yellow notice bugging you till you upgrade. This is a major release – meaning a release with new features and bug fixes, not exactly a security release so upgrading is still your choice, but we can discuss the pros/cons of upgrading another time.

Right now, there are some awesome new features I cannot wait to use!

The first is image cropping this is a heaven sent! I’ve actually been using a plugin called Scissors to do this and it’s been awesome but having is included in the core is nice. This is great for newbies too since image editing can be a challenge for some.

I also love the new video embedding option! This is awesome to get those videos up. But it must be videos from certain sites. Which means it doesn’t work with the videos that you host yourself – at least, not by default. You will need to do some tweaking before you can do that. I will be exploring how to do that and post the instructions at a later date.

Ability to optimize the database automatically is certainly good especially for busy and large sites.

There are also some other major new features that are neat and others that are more technical, useful for theme and plugin developers. I am really excited to test those out.

If you haven’t seen it, you might want to check out the highlights in this video.

http://wordpress.tv/2009/12/21/introducing-wordpress-2-9-%E2%80%93-carmen/

What about bugs?

As with any software there will be a couple. Perhaps one of the more prominent bugs is missed scheduled posts on some servers. Unfortunately, my server was one of those which is frustrating of course since I had worked hard to keep the blog going through Christmas and New Year’s. Here‘s where you can get patch files to fix the missed schedule and two other bugs as outlined by Denis. Thanks Denis!