Now WordPress bloggers can download the latest release of WordPress 2.9 and power up their blogs with new features and admin tools. Some of the coolest new features are -

1. Thrash it- Deleting posts, pages and comments will no longer delete them forever, but place them in Thrash instead. So if you accidentally delete a post or comment, you can undelete it from the Trash. Also when you delete comments, there are no more annoying confirmation requests, I am sure that is a big relief.

2. Image editor – There were hints that WordPress 2.9 was getting a basic image editor. Now you can crop, edit, rotate, flip, and scale your images easily and this will really be useful to bloggers who use external image editors now.

3. Batch plugin update – Now you don’t need to upgrade all plugins one at a time. WordPress 2.9 lets you update multiple plugins at once. The compatibility data from plugins directory ensures your plugins are compatible with new releases of WordPress.

4. Easier video embeds - I used to use a WordPress plugin to do this, but now WordPress can do this by default. WordPress 2.9 features Oembed support for YouTube, Daily Motion, Blip.tv, Flickr, Hulu, Viddler, Qik, Revision3, Scribd, Google Video, Photobucket, PollDaddy, and WordPress.tv – which means you simply paste the url of the video and WordPress will convert to the correct video embed code automatically.

5. Database optimization support – WordPress has some cool tricks activated in the backend which provides automatic WordPress database optimization! Edit your wp-config.php file and add
define('WP_ALLOW_REPAIR', true);