The first thing that hits you when you setup a fresh install of the new version is that the default theme has been changed. It really is a change to the better, I really like the new “Twenty Ten” theme even though I always tend to create my own custom themes.

New Menu Functions

Apart from this, one of the new features that I’m most glad to see, is the ability to create custom menus. It might not seem like a big deal to some, but for me it is. I often find myself wanting to add for example both categories and pages to the menu of sites that I create. Previously this was kinda tricky to achieve, and either required each menu item to be hard-coded into the template, or some plugin to handle it. But now it is just a matter of a few clicks to get it done!

Check out the video here bellow, from the WordPress blog, for a more detailed walk through of some of the new features.

As always, make sure to backup your site before upgrading to avoid any unfortunate problems! I’ve already upgraded most of my sites without any problems whatsoever, but you can’t be careful enough.

In case you haven’t noticed yet, WordPress just released version 2.9 aka “Carmen”! I haven’t really had the time, or need, to explore and test out everything yet though.

I have at least tried the one thing that I have looked forward to the most with this release – The Built-in image editor. And I must say that it works nice. It´s by no means an advance image editor like Photoshop, but it lets you do some simple editing to your uploaded files. Like rotating and crop the images as you want them. Check out the video here bellow for the rest of the features…

You can download the 2.9 from WordPress.org, or directly from your blog´s control panel!