WordPress 2.9 Nears

WordPress 2.9 is nearly ready. The WordPress team has announced the first release candidate of WordPress 2.9, and is calling for testing of 2.9. In addition to testing the platform itself, the team is asking users and plugin authors to test plugins to ensure compatibility with the latest release.

This release includes a number of new features, including a "trash" feature for comments, posts, and so on. This means that it's possible to recover elements that have been deleted until the admin permanently deletes them. 2.9 also sports image editing, a new release of TinyMCE, and improvements in media embedding.

Comments for pages have been added to the default "Kubrick" them with WordPress, so blogs can now have comments on pages as well as posts. For new blogs, the default first post will be more informative about using WordPress as opposed to the old-style "Hello World" post.

The 2.9 release also includes a slew of changes for WordPress developers, with 84 changes for 2.9 listed on the Codex. Changes range from improved documentation for the WP Filesystem to support for new post types and limiting checks for "blog by email" to every five minutes.

Plugin users can now report on the Plugin Directory whether plugins are compatible with a version. This data will be used with the WordPress compatibility checker so users can get a sense whether a plugin is compatible with their release of WordPress or not.

Assuming no major bugs are found, WordPress 2.9 should be released "before the end of the week." The release candidate download is available from the announcement.

Joe 'Zonker' Brockmeier is a longtime FOSS advocate, and currently works for Novell as the community manager for openSUSE. Prior to joining Novell, Brockmeier worked as a technology journalist covering the open source beat for a number of publications, including Linux Magazine, Linux Weekly News, Linux.com, UnixReview.com, IBM developerWorks, and many others.