WordPress 2.9 Beta 2 has just been made available and I’ve rolled it out to this blog. Here’s what we know about it:

WordPress 2.9 is currently in beta and is expected to be ready in several weeks.

Major new features for developers:
- comments meta table
- improved support for custom post types
- register_theme_directory() for additional theme locations
- back-ported JSON encode/decode for both PHP and JavaScript

and for users:
- oEmbed support
- “Trash” for posts, pages and comments
- post thumbnails support
- basic image editor

I’ve deployed it on this blog and it seems to be running really nicely. I look forward to having a play with it and reporting what I find. It beats looking around the web for medical coding training courses doesn’t it?

I must say I do like a lot of the new features in this version, especially the ability to upgrade WordPress and install plugins right off your blog. It’s a great story if you want to minimise server provisioning impact and improve roll out times. You can literaly roll out a new blog (including plugins) in a few minutes without ever needing to open your FTP client! Just sit back in your brand new shiny home theater seating; pipe your PC to an iMax screen and enjoy the show! (where’s the popcorn?)

• Image captions
• Yet more inline documentation
• “Add Media” buttons for the RTE full-screen mode
• Theme Preview fixes
• Gallery sorting fixes
• I18N fixes

See the full list of changes since Beta 2.

Get Beta 3.