Wordpress 2.9 “Carmen” (in honor of Jazz vocalist Carmen McRae, Wordpress developers dedicate each version to a Jazz Musician, list here) is now available. Other than numerous minor and subtle changes, Wordpress 2.9 brings about a new revolution with its built-in Image Editor and the new Trash feature. Lets have a look at Carmen…
Technically, Trash is more like a pre-defined Post/Page status. So like you had posts that were Drafts or Pending Reviews, you now also have posts/pages that are in Trash. There is no logical page status called trash, but you do not Delete stuff anymore, you Move it to Trash. Trash also works on comments. You cannot loose any stuff now accidentally. And with the Trash feature here, Wordpress wont ask any more “Are You Sure” questions. Click the image thumbnail on the left for full view.
Wordpress has un-rivalled media features. There is no other CMS out there that does justice to your media uploads as Wordpress does. The way Wordpress handles images and videos right out of the box is unsurpassed. With the news built-in Image Editor, it gets better. Earlier, bloggers needed special plugins (like Scissors) to edit images to best fit their posts, but now the same capabilities have been built right into the system. Using the image editor you can Crop, Edit, Rotate, Flip, and Scale images.
The better news is that this is just a beginning of the new media improvements. Click the image thumbnail on the left for full view.
Wordpress 2.9 now supports oEmbed, making embedding media from other websites a snap. All you have to do now is paste a URL in its own line and it gets converted into a proper embed code with oEmbed. What is oEmbed?
oEmbed is a format for allowing an embedded representation of a URL on third party sites. The simple API allows a website to display embedded content (such as photos or videos) when a user posts a link to that resource, without having to parse the resource directly.
Plugin management gets a batch processing now so that you cna update and manage multiple plugins at the same time. To add to these features, Wordpress 2.9 has a number of other improvements which are listed in the release announcement. Wordpress was already the best open source blogging platform out there (it also won Packt Publishing’s Best CMS Award this year) and it just keeps getting better.
If you are already using Wordpress, upgrade from inside Wordpress by using Tools > Upgrade option. If you are not on Wordpress, now will be a good moment to move to it.
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Author: Kinshuk Sunil (72 Articles)
Kinshuk Sunil is the founder of the WiSy Blog. An active evangelist for Open Source and a enthusiast Game Designer, Kinshuk focuses on reviewing Softwares, Services and Games here. However, a jack of all trades, Kinshuk can be found talking about almost everything. Catch up with him on twitter @kinshuksunil.
