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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