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WordPress is one of the most exciting Open Source Content Managemant Systems (CMS) currently on the web. It started in 2003 and became popular as people discovered its simplicity and usefulness. While still not perfect, numerous plug-ins already exist, or you can write by one yourself (with a little knowledge of PHP).

WordPress was designed at first as a personal publishing system. It’s best working on a Linux-based server, although a Windows Server would do just fine as long as it has PHP & MySQL database installed and running. WordPress is an Open Source project which means that you can freely use and modify it for personal or commercial use, which is another reason that makes it so popular.

As of today, the current version of WordPress is 2.85.

WordPress 2.9 introduce an upgrade for system requirements which kick out MySQL 4.0 as the minimum in favor of MySQL 4.1. This may sound like a small requirement change, but for some it’s a hazardous one. If your server doesn’t run at least MySQL 4.1, you will probably not be able to install, not upgrade to next version of WordPress.

If your website is hosted on a shared server, you should check the MySQL version installed on your Server. Do it now, and be prepared to ask your shared hosting service to upgrade MySQL or move your website into a different server. That is of course if you want to keep upgrading in the future.

If you want to check the 2.9 Beta version yourself, backup your database and install the WordPress Beta Tester plugin on your site.

A full new features list is attached to the end of this article.

New Features

User Features

• Trash status for posts, pages, comments and attachments (includes restore and permanent delete)
• Add support for ‘include’ and ‘exclude’ to  (Gallery Shortcode)
• Allow user registration to be enabled by an XMLRPC client
• Add support for sticky posts to the WXR exporter and importer
• rel=canonical for singular pages
• Scroll back to the same location after saving a file in the Plugin and Theme editors
• Correct comments and remove unecessary echos from the default themes sidebar templete file
• Enable the APP (Atom) attachment file download to work correctly
• Support location of category templates based on ‘category-slug’ as well as ‘category-id’ (Ticket 10614)
• Support location of tag templates based on ‘tag-id’ as well as ‘tag-slug’ (Ticket 10868)
• Support location of page templates based on ‘page-slug’ and ‘page-id’
• Set “Allow my blog to appear in search engines” to checked in installation
• Don’t offer to make a category its own parent
• Remove Sphere from search list
• Minify admin CSS
• Show correct max upload filesize error message
• Add rel attribute to next/previous post links
• Make the default and classic themes comment textareas valid XHTML
• Clean up .button and .button[disabled] CSS classes, add spinner and gray-out buttons after clicking Publish or Update post
• Fix race condition with autosave when clicking Publish immediately after entering post title
• Add Comments for Pages in the WordPress Default theme
• Define $content_width for Kubrick
• Better feedback on publishing of future posts and pages
• Display comments in descending date order, consistently
• Add means of automatically repairing tables
• Fix Press This bookmarklet for Safari 4
• Give plugins and themes simple control over the text displayed at the end of an autogenerated Excerpt
• Don’t show “Change Permalinks” button when editing the page set as “Front page”
• Image editing
• Retire BunnyTags importer
• Retire Jerome’s keywords importer
• Explain that the permalink is temporary for autosave generated permalinks
• Update SimplePie to 1.2
• Press This fixes
• Eliminate the redundant and confusing comment threading depth of 1

Development, Themes, Plugins

• Added ‘excerpt_more‘ filter to wp_trim_excerpt() function, which allow developers to change excerpt ‘[...]‘ more string (Ticket 10395)
• Add ‘smilies_src‘ filter so plugins can better add smilies
• Canonical redirects for post name queries
• Allow _wp_get_comment_list to handle custom comment types
• Return an empty array instead of false for get_children() when no children found
• Add some filters so that HTTP requests can be filtered
• Move plugin update notice output to the plugin specific hook
• Limit wp-mail ‘blog by email’ checks to every 5 minutes
• Make it much easier to filter contact methods from user profiles
• Allow filtering of get_edit_post_link for custom post_type
• ‘get_sample_permalink_html‘ filter
• Enforce activation key to be a string, reject activation keys that are arrays
• Respect custom post_type in queries
• Send Retry-After header when in maintenance mode
• Various WP Filesystem related fixes and documentation
• Add constants for ftp connections timeouts
• Increase timeout on cron-based requests when checking for upgrades
• Don’t use has_action() before do_action() in http.php
• Speed up jQuery based scripts
• Use the current user as author for autosave
• Show My Posts as default view on the Edit Posts screen for users without ‘edit_others_posts’ cap
• Ensure that drafts viewed over XMLRPC have a correct gmt date set
• Pass user id to ‘get_’ the_author_meta filters
• Move _wp_get_user_contactmethods() into the registrations functions file
• Machine parseable db error codes
• Add global JS vars and actions to the media uploader iframe
• Add JSON compat for PHP < 5.2
• Make option_name the primary key for the options table
• Allow a plugin to do a complete takeover of Post by Email
• Logarithmic scale for tag cloud
• Pass Post ID to the ‘get_comments_number‘ filter
• Always filter the url in the media upload form
• Add a ‘the_terms‘ filter
• is_blog_installed() improvements
• Allow force_ssl_admin() to properly accept false as a value
• Pass logged_in cookie to async-upload and filter the cookie scheme in auth_redirect()
• Add more actions around database add/delete/update operations
• phpDoc for wp_”check|set”_post_lock functions
• Use the old strings which are more translator friendly and add a generic default string to aid re-use by plugins adding post_types
• Filter fields through kses upon display and introduce sanitize_user_object() and sanitize_user_field()
• Use null instead of 0 when setting content length
• Include ‘hidden’ directories in filesystem dirlist by default
• Pass args array to ‘wp_list_pages‘ filter
• Actions for taxonomy updates
• Key should be comment_id not post_id in comments table
• Add get_delete_post_link to retrieve delete posts link for post
• Add ‘separator‘ parameter to wp_tag_cloud() and wp_generate_tag_cloud() functions (Ticket 10315)
• Added add_comment_meta() family of functions

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