WordPress 2.9 is right around the corner. The fearless and brave have already upgraded to 2.9-rare. I think I’ll wait for the beta to come out before I upgrade, which should be in a week or two.

Anyways, Doug Campbell is one of these people who has to live on the bleeding edge I guess. Actually I have no idea – but he did upgrade his blog to 2.9-rare.

He’s posted a quick article about 2.9 and tacked on a very handy feature list. Probably nothing new if you keep up with WordPress, but a good break down never-the-less.

To summarize what’s new in 2.9:

• Post thumbnails
• “trash” status.
• Image editing (resize, crop, flip)
• widgets outside the sidebar
• custom post types
• better media embeds (think viper’s video quicktags)
• register_theme_directory() function

You can read a few more details in his write up. WordPress 2.9 is expected to be beta by end of October and hopefully released a month after that.