I hadn’t paid much attention to the previews of the new features to be introduced with WordPress 2.9.
But, having upgraded yesterday, I have to say that I’m left with mixed feelings.
I understand that there’s quite a lot that was designed to help plugin and theme developers, but for humble users (you and me) there’s some interesting goodies, one that didn’t work and a rather pointless one:
A piece of new functionality that should have made life better for us has been hidden away and made unnecessarily troublesome to access.
Let’s start with the good
Image Editor
WP 2.9 brought the introduction of a simple image editor that allows you to crop, flip, rotate or re-size images.
You can do this either as soon as you upload them or later by clicking the new ‘Edit Image’ button that now appears at the bottom right of images in your gallery.
I’ve always done any editing of my images before uploading them to WordPress, because I often add notations or comments to them, which the WordPress image editor doesn’t handle.
So I don’t see myself changing this process any time soon, but I can see that once an image is in WordPress and you realise you need to re-size it a bit more, this would be a quick and easy way of doing it.
The images need to be in your gallery for you to be able to edit them (rather obviously) and I mostly upload images to a folder outside of WordPress and link to them.
So this editor isn’t going to work for me anyway 
Embedding Videos
(This one’s pretty cool – or should be)
No longer do you need to fiddle with embedding code, which often brings you into conflict with the WordPress HTML police if you try to format it.
You can now simply paste the URL of the video into your Visual view – which is how I tried to embed the video I’ve linked to below.
However, no matter what I tried I couldn’t get this to work. So I resorted to the tried and trusted method of embedding the source code into the HTML view.
A shame – that would have been neat.
Important: The auto embedding of videos is enabled by default but you need to visit the Settings>Media screen and insert the maximum embeddable size, just in case you can get it to work!
If you don’t and you embed a video that’s wider than your content column it’s all going to look like a bit of a mess.
Trash Can
They’ve modified the delete process (for everything – posts, comments, tags etc.) by adding a Trash Can. Instead of seeing the ‘delete’ option you now see ‘Trash’.
Items in the Trash Can will be permanently deleted after 30 days (much like Yahoo Email accounts).
Bulk Upgrade of Plugins
This is demonstrated in the video I’ve linked to below, so it must be there. But I missed it completely when I upgraded a rash of plugins this morning!
Still, from watching the video this enables you to select plugins for upgrading (to be super efficient you could go to the ‘Upgrade Available’ view and select all) and click ‘Upgrade’.
WordPress will upgrade them and check compatibility with your version. Neat – and I must look out for this next time I have some plugins to upgrade.
Canonical URLs
A new tag which is now automatically inserted into the HEAD area from 2.9 on is the Canonical URL tag. This is useful because it tells the search engines which is the primary link for your post.
And that’s important because posts on your blog can be accessed via a number of different links: tag archives, category archives, date archives and so on.
However, the All-in-one-SEO pack, Platinum SEO, Thesis and probably a few other tools, have all provided Canonical URL functionality for a while, and if you’re using WordPress with any of those you’ll now have 2 Canonical URL links in your HEAD section.
I don’t what, if any, impact that will have. But I’ll be watching.
Stuff that seems a bit pointless
Automatic Database Repairing
At first sight, telling you that Auto Database Repairing is a bit pointless seems unnecessarily downbeat.
But here’s why:
In order to activate it you have to add a line of code to your config.php file.
Now people who are on top of managing their databases don’t really need this functionality because they’re already doing it.
And the very people who should benefit from this (those who are not comfortable with this kind of stuff) are not likely to be comfortable fiddling around with bits of code in their config.php file.
Which means there’s a high likelihood they won’t activate it.
It can’t have been that much of a stretch to avoid the need for this by creating a menu item in the admin screens.
Still, maybe that will come with a later release.
OK – here’s a quick video tour of WordPress 2.9:
Leave us a comment with your reactions to WordPress 2.9, especially if you can get that video embedding thing to work!
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{ 15 comments… read them below or add one }
I was trying to upgrade to 2.9, but I am having an Error 500 during the automatic upgrade. I still can’t detect the problem. It is hosted on a server that I have root access.
marvin´s last blog ..Breaking Point
Hi Marvin,
Sorry to hear that, but your hosting provider should be able to help – did you raise a ticket?
Martin.
Unfortunately, it was a VPS given to me for free from a friend (in exchange of a favor), there are no support.
I converted my current install to svn so I could update via subversion.
marvin´s last blog ..Breaking Point
I was wondering about the update. I haven’t had a chance to play with it yet. Thinking about waiting to new year. Right now I’m regaining my momentum in building traffic to my site after all the other trouble I caused myself.
corrie´s last blog ..Football Interest Grows
Sure – and I’ve discovered another little problem which has only arisen since I upgraded:
I’m getting loads of errors from my Feedburner health check feed – which means that my RSS feed isn’t working too well since the upgrade. It may be coincidence, of course, and the errors fix themselves, but I’m currently getting up to 30 a day whereas I normally get 1 every couple of days.
Martin.
I´m still using an older version of Wordpress because some plugins always stop working after upgrade.I wonder why they push out new versions all the time?
Tom, hi,
Many of the interim upgrades are security fixes and the primary upgrades cover both security and new functionality.
If you prefer to stay with an older version of WP you need to make sure your installation is as secure as you can make it, because the older versions do get targetted.
Cheers,
Martin.
Hi Martin
Thanks for the overview of 2.9.
Perhaps your line “some interesting goodies, one that didn’t work and a rather pointless one” says it all!
Like you I edit and optimise images before uploading so not sure about the image editor.
Canonical URL’s – I use All in one SEO.
Upgrade of plugins – not had to do that yet but will have to shortly, three are in need of upgrade.
I’ve heard of a few problems with 2.9 and I understand that 2.9.1 is out already so I’ll wait a while before I upgrade.
Keith Davis´s last blog ..Ooh la la…
Hi Keith,
Yes – 2.9.1 is on the point of being released. Probably in the next couple of days.
It’s a bug fix release and one of the bugs that’s being fixed is one that affects the scheduled publishing of posts – which was a function that I found very useful, so I’m looking forward to the update
Cheers,
Martin.
Great review Martin, thanks. I don’t think I’ll bother with the update, I’m just getting to grips with thesis and 2.8. I’m beginning to feel comfortable with this combination and I’m not ready to step out of this comfort zone yet so I’ll stay put for a while. Might wait for 2.10.
I use “vipers-video-quicktags” plugin for embedding videos. It works great, it’s so simply even I can do it.
Thanks for taking the time to write the review. It was very informative.
Paul
Paul´s last blog ..Driving Traffic To Your Site With Article Marketing
Paul, hi,
I can understand a reluctance to move away from something that’s working for you, but letting your WordPress version get out of date increases the risk of your blog being hacked.
I do recommend keeping it up to date.
When a new WordPress release comes out that contains major changes I usually do a review, so check back here if you need to know what’s new before upgrading. I also update my online WordPress tutorial after each primary release (e.g. 2.8 to 2.9), so you can get info there if you get stuck.
Also, upgrades are less risky if you’re upgrading to the next release each time, than they are if you’re jumping releases – e.g. 2.8 to 2.10.
If you need any help drop me a line!
Cheers,
Martin.
You’re right, I never thought about the security aspects. I’ll have a look at your tutorials and upgrade.
Thanks
paul
Paul´s last blog ..Driving Traffic To Your Site With Article Marketing
You’re welcome – if you get stuck with anything let me know!
Cheers,
Martin.
The current one isn’t bad, it’s just too many steps to get to the advanced features for formatting around the images or video. Sizing them is still fine and linking them up to the post or a larger image of the image being inserted are still options are easy to get use. I was able to install plugins and themes without many issue. Of course all of them displayed messages letting me know that they weren’t tested with this version of WP and they could blow up the universe if installed.
WordPress is certainly a lot more user-friendly now than it was 2 or 3 years ago, but I’m surprised you got lots of those ‘not tested’ warnings.
Authors of the good plugins (and certainly the more complex ones) are pretty good at keeping them up to date with the new versions of WordPress.
Cheers,
Martin.
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