Thomas Mackenzie alerted us to a problem where logged in users can peek at trashed posts belonging to other authors. If you have untrusted users signed up on your blog and sensitive posts in the trash, you should upgrade to 2.9.2. As always, you can visit the Tools->Upgrade menu to upgrade.

Changelog: WordPress 2.9.2
Download: WordPress 2.9.2
Download: Modified files since WordPress 2.9.1

This release addresses a handful of minor issues as well as a rather annoying problem where scheduled posts and pingbacks are not processed correctly due to incompatibilities with some hosts.

Changelog: WordPress 2.9.1
Download: WordPress 2.9.1
Download: Modified files since WordPress 2.9

Here are some of the highlights:

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. This is the first wave of our many planned media-handling improvements.
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. We now have rel=canonical support for better SEO.
6. There is automatic database optimization support, which you can enable in your wp-config.php file by adding define('WP_ALLOW_REPAIR', true);.
7. Themes can register “post thumbnails” which allow them to attach an image to the post, especially useful for magazine-style themes.
8. A new commentmeta table that allows arbitrary key/value pairs to be attached to comments, just like posts, so you can now expand greatly what you can do in the comment framework.
9. Custom post types have been upgraded with better API support so you can juggle more types than just post, page, and attachment. (More of this planned for 3.0.)
10. You can set custom theme directories, so a plugin can register a theme to be bundled with it or you can have multiple shared theme directories on your server.
11. We’ve upgraded TinyMCE WYSIWYG editing and Simplepie.
12. Sidebars can now have descriptions so it’s more obvious what and where they do what they do.
13. Specify category templates not just by ID, like before, but by slug, which will make it easier for theme developers to do custom things with categories — like post types!
14. Registration and profiles are now extensible to allow you to collect things more easily, like a user’s Twitter account or any other fields you can imagine.
15. The XML-RPC API has been extended to allow changing the user registration option. We fixed some Atom API attachment issues.
16. Create custom galleries with the new include and exclude attributes that allow you to pull attachments from any post, not just the current one.
17. When you’re editing files in the theme and plugin editors it remembers your location and takes you back to that line after you save. (Thank goodness!!!)
18. 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.
19. Custom taxonomies are now included in the WXR export file and imported correctly.
20. Better hooks and filters for excerpts, smilies, HTTP requests, user profiles, author links, taxonomies, SSL support, tag clouds, query_posts and WP_Query

Download: WordPress 2.9 (2.2MB)
Changelog: WordPress 2.9

Upgraded this site to WordPress 2.9 RC1, my plugins seems to work well.

Changelog WordPress 2.9 RC1
Download: WordPress 2.9 RC1

I tested my plugins on WordPress 2.9 Beta 1 and it all works without any problem. I don’t think I will have time to release any updates till I get back from my holiday at the end of December 2009. Having said that, the current version of my plugin should work fine with WordPress 2.9 as well.

Download: WordPress 2.9 Beta 2
View: Changes Since Beta 1

Here is the list:

• Post Thumbnails: add an image to be automatically displayed with the post in various views (main page, archives, etc.). The WordPress logo on this post is added with this feature, plus a filter I added to my theme’s functions.php file.
• “Trash” status: deleted items such as posts, pages, and comments now go to the “trash”, and can be recovered later, much like delete files in most modern operating systems.
• Image editing: basic image manipulation for your media library. You can rotate, flip, resize, and crop images.
• Widgets outside of sidebars: there is a new template tag called the_widget(), which allows you to put a widget anywhere in your theme.
• Comment metadata: plugins and themes can now take advantage of arbitrary metadata for comments, just as for posts, pages, and users. This should make it easier to create plugins to highlight “popular” or “hot” comments, among other things.
• Custom post types: general support for post types other than ‘post’, ‘page’, and ‘attachment’. This plus the custom taxonomy support we already have will go far to address those to like to claim that WordPress is not a ‘real’ CMS. We’ll be able to organize content in ways that I can’t even think of right now (I need more time to brainstorm).
• Media Embeds: I haven’t had a chance to look over this all the way yet, but it’s basically Viper’s Video Quicktags folded into core (minus the editor buttons at this time), including support for the oEmbed standard. With oEmbed, you can just paste in the URL for a page containing embeddable media, and it can auto-detect the proper way to embed it in your post. Supported services so far appear to be YouTube, Google Video, PollDaddy, and DailyMotion. Plus, theoretically, any service that supports oEmbed, which currently includes YouTube, Flickr, Vimeo, Viddler, Qik, and Hulu, among others (according to the oEmbed site). Whoah, awesome! I’ll post a demo of this soon, but you can read Viper007Bond’s post now for more details.
• register_theme_directory(): plugins can now add additional theme directories to be searched. This means that a theme can basically come bundled with its own themes. I’ve already got a project that’s been on the back-burner that can use this feature. I think we might seem some nifty uses appearing in the future.

For more information, check out Dougal’s post on WordPress 2.9 Features