Wordpress 2.9 – What is new

The bug hunt is well under way and there is a freeze on new features for Wordpress 2.9

The new features in the pre-beta version that are:

1. a new “post thumbnail” option in the main editing area
2. the option to place posts/pages/comments in the “trash” rather than immediately deleting them
3. a new image editor to allow some basic fixing and tweaking.

So far it does not look like this is an update that is going to break too many plugins.

Post Thumbnail

There were a few plugins to do this, but the ability to add a thumbnail for a post/page is a welcome improvement.  The thumbnail will show up in post/page listings (such as category or archive) as an image indenting the text.  Looks very smart.

Trash

Just like your computer operating system wordpress will now allow you to place items in the trash safe in the knowledge that if you change your mind you can retrieve them.  May not sound a big deal but if you’ve ever accidentally deleted an old post or page you’ll know that it can cause problems.

Image Editing:

Some pretty basic functions like resizing, cropping or rotating images but still very useful.  Combined with the Post Thumbnail it cuts down the number of tasks involved in getting a good looking post live.

Media Embedding

For anyone using video this looks like a great time saver (not to mention improvement in presentation).  Just enter a url for a video and wordpress will decide the best way to embed it into your page.  Still playing with this!

There are other changes which the end user probably won’t notice directly as they are aimed at plugin and theme writers.  Content metadata and custom post types being two of them.  Potentially quite big changes for the future and may not be noticeable until the user interface is updated in wordpress 3.0

Still playing with the nightly builds of Wordpress 2.9 so will update further as I discover more changes, but think that’s it.