WordPress 2.9 is out.

It’s out. The world’s most popular blogging engine has released it’s latest update and there’s a little something for everyone.

Along with a mass of bug and security fixes, WordPress highlights the following as the major geek candy:

1. Global undo/”trash” feature, which means that if you accidentally delete a post or comment you can bring it back from the grave (i.e., the Trash). This also eliminates those annoying “are you sure” messages we used to have on every delete.
2. Built-in image editor allows you to crop, edit, rotate, flip, and scale your images to show them who’s boss.
3. Batch plugin update and compatibility checking, which means you can update 10 plugins at once, versus having to do multiple clicks for each one, and we’re using the new compatibility data from the plugins directory to give you a better idea of whether your plugins are compatible with new releases of WordPress. This should take the fear and hassle out of upgrading.
4. Easier video embeds that allow you to just paste a URL on its own line and have it magically turn it into the proper embed code, with Oembed support for YouTube, Daily Motion, Blip.tv, Flickr, Hulu, Viddler, Qik, Revision3, Scribd, Google Video, Photobucket, PollDaddy, and WordPress.tv (and more in the next release).
5. Comments for pages have been added to the default “Kubrick” them with WordPress, so blogs can now have comments on pages as well as posts.
6. Hello World: For new blogs, the default first post will be more informative about using WordPress as opposed to the old-style “Hello World” post.
7. Comments: You can now expand greatly what you can do in comment framework thanks to a new commentmeta table that allows arbitrary key/value pairs to be attached to comments, just like posts.
8. The Press This bookmarklet has been improved and is faster than ever; give it a try for on-the-fly blogging from wherever you are on the internet.

The 2.9 release also includes a slew of changes for WordPress developers, with 84 changes for 2.9 listed on the Codex. Changes range from improved documentation for the WP Filesystem to support for new post types and limiting checks for “blog by email” to every five minutes.

You can upgrade easily from your Dashboard by going to Tools > Upgrade, or you can download from WordPress.org. More info here.