The main additional features in 2.9 are:

• “Trash” – posts and comments are no longer deleted, they are now simply “moved to trash” (or tomb-stoned) – no more “are you sure?” messages on delete. NOTE: This feature is implemented for pages too!
• One-click batch upgrading of plugins – with plugin compatibility checking to ensure only plugins that work with the installed WordPress version are installed.
• Built-in image editing – so you can crop, rotate and flip images to fit into your posts and pages.
• Video embedding support – that makes embedding videos from the major video sharing sites much simpler.

There are also some “under the hood” features that theme developers will find useful:

• Support for canonical URLs (a hot topic in the SEO community)
• Updated version of the included WYSIWIG editor (TinyMCE).
• Extensible user profiles and registration.

This all makes the platform even more user friendly and easy to manage and maintain.

Next up for WordPress is the merging of the WordPress MU (multi-user) code. This will make WordPress even more interesting for Enterprise use, since it allows multiple blogs from a single WordPress instance. I’ve had the chance to use WordPress MU for a couple of projects, and I’m very excited about it becoming part of the core product. 2010 is going to be a pivotal year for WordPress. As of this moment, WordPress 2.9 has already had over a million downloads.

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2.8 builds on the developments that lead to the plugin browser, to add a theme browser into the WordPress interface. It enables you to search the WordPress theme directory, without leaving your wordpress blog. Tick box selection narrows down the theme choices from the thousands of free themes available. I’m not yet clear on how this will work for commercially supported themes, important to businesses that are blogging. Most businesses have a custom developed theme, so this will most likely not be an issue.

The release also adds syntax highlihting into the theme editor, which makes it much easier to customise themes and will be a boon for developers. Widgets have been enhanced at multiple levels too, starting with the interface to them. There is a lot more control over how you can interact with them, together  with support for multiple instances of a single widget, and a drag and drop interface to allow you to move widgets from one column to another. Again, this makes site customisation much simpler, and will cut down on the amount of coding required. There is also an “inactive widgets” pen, to save customisations of widgets for later use. This is a big improvement over the old interface, which simply lost customisations.

A Widget API has been added to simplfiy the widget development process, which will hopefully enhance the number and quality of widgets available for the platform. The administration interface is generally easier to customise, for example enabling changes to the number of columns and items per page, and scaling the page with the browser window. These features build on the improvements delivered in 2.7. There are some speed optimizations too, to speed up the process of blogging.

All in all, another step forward for the usability and flexibility of the WordPress platform, which is growing from strength to strength, particularly as it starts to eat into the CMS application space.

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