WordPress 2.9 is officially ready for download and is named “Carmen” in honor of the magical jazz vocalist Carmen McRae). This version comes with global Undo/Trash feature which lets you recover any deleted posts. Another cool features for WordPress 2.9 is built-in image editor. You can now crop, edit, rotate, flip, and scale your images on the fly.
Other minor modifications include:
- 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