Wordpress 2.9 is here people! And, not being the one to be  left behind, I have upgraded my blog with immediate effect. I am yet to feel the actual effects of the exciting new features available in ‘Carmen’, but I’m sure you are going to get a lot more from Matt & co.

Some features highlights are:

1. New Trash Can feature that lets you restore accidentally deleted posts
2. Integrated image editor
3. Plugin installer and much more.

Check the new Wordpress 2.9 today and you will know why it is one of the most popular and leading web publishing platforms out there today!

Btw, there’s a handy video to show you the features at a glance:

WordPress 2.6.1 is now available for use. It must be noted, however, that this release is an optional upgrade and is recommended only for self-hosted users who have their blogs on Windows Hosting ( with IIS ). So, if you are one of them, then you must consider upgrading. This is what the WordPress team says about this release fixing a lot of issues for IIS:

For IIS users, 2.6.1 fixes several permalink problems. Image insertion problems in the Press This feature experienced by IE users are also fixed. Of note to everyone is a fix for a performance bug in the admin where those with a lot of plugins would experience slowness on some pages.

It also has some fixes for international users, especially right-to-left languages improvements:

2.6.1 offers several improvements for international users. Styling of the admin for right-to-left languages is much improved thanks to the efforts of the Farsi and Hebrew translation teams, and a mysterious gettext bug caused by certain PHP configurations is now fixed.

WordPress has announced a rollup and bug fixing patch release for WordPress 2.6 which is v 2.6.1 Beta 1. It is not a security update so you can relax and hang up your boots for now. It is primarily intended for IIS users who are hosting there blogs on IIS hosts. So see if it is applicable to you or not. Do what you want. As for me, I am happy with my Linux hosting on GoDaddy. So, I guess I will stay put with 2.6

Well, as much as we all love WordPress, here’s one more reason to be happy with it. In the latest version of Wordpress, version 2.6, Team WordPress have added support for Google Gears. Here’s some info right from the horse’s mouth. Mentioned on the Google Gears Blog:

WordPress.com just recently went live with Gears support for accelerating the user-interface, and the upcoming WordPress 2.6 release will also bundle Gears.

Andrew Ozz, a member of the WordPress team and the person responsible for the Gears integration wrote the following guest post on his experience working with Gears:

I thoroughly enjoyed working with Gears. After checking the excellent API documentation and examples, the test implementation of a ManagedResourceStore in WordPress was ready to go in about an hour.

A good thing it is. For those who are unfamiliar with what this post is talking about and what the heck Gears is, Google Gears is an open source framework from Google which enables websites to run offline.

Yes! This means that you can access your favorite (Gears enabled ) website even while you are disconnected from the internet. Let’s say that you have your account on Gmail (which by all possibility is Gears enabled) and you want to surf your emails while you remain disconnected from the internet (after loading up your inbox of course!), Gears is for you. Gears also enables the supported sites to load a lot faster (since almost all of their stuff is stored on your PC).

Download Google Gears

Download Wordpress 2.6

For all you techies out there who want to check out the next major release of Wordpress can get the Release Candidate 1 of Wordpress 2.5 and post their feedback to the Wordpress team so that it can be included in the final release of 2.5.

I just found this article on Weblogtoolscollection.com which talks of a plugin that allows WordPress to be integrated with Drupal. Good news (if it’s working perfectly) for those who have been managing the two installations separately. The integration of logons is also a feature of this plugin which lets you use a unified sign-in both the systems.

So, the next version of WordPress 2.3 is out. Go check the features and enhancements available in this release: WordPress 2.3

Congrats to the team for giving out a new release for one of the best publishing platforms on the web!

The WordPress team has released the first release candidate of the next major release, v2.3. For more details check out the post: WordPress 2.3 Release Candidate 1.

There have been some database changes in the next major release of WordPress, v2.3. The changes are going to affect a lot of plugins as outlined in this article from Ryan, WordPress 2.3 Database Schema Changes.

If you are a plugin author, please heed to the changes if this affects you and upgrade the plugins accordingly. If you are a Blogger who is using WordPress, please make sure your plugins and themes are compatible before migrating to the new version.

As for me, I might as well have some coffee. I am still on version 2.2 of WordPress. I couldn’t even upgrade to the security fixes released by the WP guys! Busy as I am, I couldn’t spare the time for it. As for upgrading to 2.3, I really do not know when I’m gonna do it (If I think of it at all). Maybe by version 2.5 or something? I have to think. Ok, not much time to think about this.

That’s it I’ll go for my coffee now.

There is a new security update for Wordpress 2.2! This version is currently a release candidate (v2.2.1 RC). Check this article about it to know what’s what in this release.