Upgrading to Wordpress 2.9

Wordpress has been announced the availability of Wordpress 2.9, “Carmen”. The name was taken as honor to magical jazz vocalist, “Carmen McRae” (sadly, I don’t know him. Colin McRae instead of Carmen sound more familiar to me ).

What is the coolest features from the latest update of Wordpress ?

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).

Beside the above features, the latest update also noticed a number of improvement and bug fixes.

I’m upgrading the blog engine by using online upgrading from dashboard menu. The upgrading process from previous version (WP 2.8.6) took a few seconds and overall seems to be run smoothly. What’s make me happy, my current themes didn’t find any problem with this update.

If you wish to upgrade the blog engine, don’t forget to backup current configuration to prevent any trouble with your themes or plugins.