Upgrade to WordPress 2.9

Whats new in WordPress 2.9 Carmen ?? Firstly, this version is named after a famous Jazz musician Carmen McRae. Moving on, there are quite a number of improvements, but most of them are under-the-hood. So, GUI/appearance fans will have little to be happy about. But those who go for functionality and tweakable features, they will have their hands full. 🙂

The hottest ‘visible’ features are:

1. The most hyped feature is the “Easier video embed” support !! Now you can simply paste a YouTube link in your post and WordPress will embed the video on that page automatically for you. However, the online streaming sites should be in the WordPress “whitelist” of sites (currently there is support for YouTube, Daily Motion, Blip.tv, Flickr, Hulu, Viddler, Qik, Revision3, Scribd, Google Video, Photobucket, PollDaddy, and WordPress.tv). This is to ensure that you don’t end up embedding content from malicious websites. Read more about easier video embedding in WordPress 2.9.

2. Built-in image editor that lets you crop, flip, and rotate images in your blog media on the fly !! Really hand feature.

Embedding the video from WordPress regarding the 2.9 Carmen release.

Some technical (back-end) enhancements are:

1. Support for rel=canonical for better SEO.

2. Automatic database optimization support, which you can enable in your wp-config.php file by adding define(‘WP_ALLOW_REPAIR’, true);

For more details, check out WordPress development team’s post on WordPress 2.9

Happy upgrading !! 🙂
PS: Firstly, remember to make a fresh backup before upgrading. Secondly, If you get “Download failed.: Operation timed out after 60000 milliseconds with xxxxxx bytes” error, simply go to yourBlog/wp-admin/includes/file.php and change

$response = wp_remote_get($url, array(‘timeout’ => 30));

or

$response = wp_remote_get($url, array(‘timeout’ => 60));

to

$response = wp_remote_get($url, array(‘timeout’ => 120));

If you are getting a server error of 500 (like on IIS 7.5) due to “FastCGI Activity Timeout”, leave a comment regarding it and I’ll guide you through it 🙂