Lancecorner

WordPress, a popular blogging tool has released its new 2.9 version. The developer of this particular version has placed the release as candidate which means all features that were to be added during the beta version are added. This version could be made official except it can use some extra testing for possible software bugs.

Wordpress logo

WordPress users are welcome to give feedbacks on the release candidate and test run the version to know if everything works well. A good example is to check the compatibility of this version to third party plug-ins. Some plug-ins are developed for a particular WordPress version.

You can download the release candidate version using the link below.

http://wordpress.org/wordpress-2.9-RC1.zip

Notable WordPress 2.9 Features:

WordPress Recycle Bin / Trash

This particular feature is very useful. Instead of permanently deleting posts, users can now put the blog post on trash and recovered it later. By default, WordPress will empty the trash every 30 days but this limit can be change by simply placing code below in the wp-config.php file.

define ( ‘EMPTY_TRASH_DAYS’, 10 );

Image Editor

This is probably one of the most awaited features among WordPress users. The image editor will let users make simple changes on images like rotating, cropping, flipping, resizing, scaling and more. Below is the screen shot on how it looks.

Wordpress Image Editor

Post Thumbnails

Wordpress Media Editor

For earlier version of WordPress, it is usually done through custom fields. The ability to add thumbnails without a custom field is very useful especially for newbie WordPress users. Adding post thumbnails and displaying it in the template is even much easier. Users must have a WordPress theme that supports this function. To add, simply go to theme’s functions.php file and add the code below.

add_theme_support( ‘post-thumbnails’ );

To display, place the following code on the WordPress template:

The 2.9 version is considered a major update of WordPress.