I just upgraded to WordPress 2.9 and after reviewing a few blog posts about the new features I have created my own post with the three features that are the most vital to Bloggers.  This latest version of WordPress is named “Carmen” and can be downloaded here.

1. Image Editing

Image editing is my favorite new feature of WordPress 2.9. The new image editing features allow bloggers to scale and rotate images, as well as crop, without having to open another image editing.

Note the “Edit Image” button in the screenshot below.

The crop feature (to use just click, and drag):

The cropped image, seconds later:

As I tried to show with the screenshots above image editing, such as cropping, is exceptionally easy.

2. The Trash Can

The trash can is designed to save you from deleting things you never really wanted to delete. The below image is where you can access the trash, from posts/edit.

The trash is emptied every 30 days as a default setting, but you can change this by editing your wp-config.php file. Add the following text to your config file to change trash collection to every 7 days:

define(‘EMPTY_TRASH_DAYS’,7);

The above script can be modified so that the trash can is emptied on whatever interval you choose.

3. oEmbed

oEmbed, allows media providers like Flickr, YouTube and the others listed below to provide data for platforms like WordPress to import media.  By including an Embed URL and pasting the link to the page that contains the media, WordPress can retrieve the media file associated with the url and insert the media into the post accordingly.

The list of supported oEmbed sites in WordPress are as follows:

• YouTube (via oEmbed)
• Blip.tv (via oEmbed)
• Flickr images and videos (via oEmbed)
• Hulu (via oEmbed)
• Viddler (via oEmbed)
• Qik.com (via oEmbed)
• Revision3 (via oEmbed)
• Google Video (via an internal handler)
• PollDaddy (via an internal handler)
• DailyMotion (via an internal handler)

{embed}http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cRdxXPV9GNQ{/embed}

Using the exact code above, except with [] brackets instead of {}, I embedded the trailer for Avatar below.

Summary

If you are a plugin developer check out this post which covers seven of the new features that I did not mention.

What is your favorite new feature of WordPress? Let us know in the comments below.