WordPress 2.9 “Carmen”: What’s New & Problems You Could Face

WordPress Users can now enjoy better wordpress experience by upgrading to the newer version 2.9 named “Carmen”. The new name has been kept in honor of magical jazz vocalist Carmen McRae.

WordPress 2.9 comes Up with many new features as always. The main new features I’ve actually seen so far are the addition of the “Post Thumbnail” box in the writing screen, the new “Trash” status for posts, pages, and comments, and the image editor in the Media Library.

Here is a list of major features which can be seen in Worpdress 2.9 (source: wordpress.org):

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.

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.

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.

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).

You can see these Major Changes in a Video provided by wordpress:

Some other changes which looked interesting to me:

  1. WordPress now have rel=canonical support for better SEO.
  2. There is automatic database optimization support, which you can enable in your wp-config.php file by adding: define('WP_ALLOW_REPAIR', true);
  3. Themes can register “post thumbnails” which allow them to attach an image to the post, especially useful for magazine-style themes.
  4. 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.
  5. WordPress 2.9 now have upgraded TinyMCE WYSIWYG editing and Simplepie.
  6. Sidebars can now have descriptions so it’s more obvious what and where they do what they do.
  7. 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!
  8. 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.
  9. 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.
  10. 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.

Moreover, WordPress 2.9 have come up with over 500 bugs fix and enhancement.

Beware While Upgrading – You May Face Some Problems

While upgrading, I faced some problems which weren’t that too big but it may scare some newbie wordpress user. The automatic upgrade feature which was brought in v2.7 still didn’t prove to work good like many have been complaining.

[Remember To Take Backup Of Your WordPress Before Upgrading]

In my case, while using AutoUpgrading feature of WordPress, the installation got hanged and it was showing “Installing WordPress”. The blog homepage showed the message “Briefly unavailable for scheduled maintenance. Check back in a minute” to the people. If you face this problem, this means that upgrading wordpress was uncessucceful.

To Solve it:

  1. Access your site files through a FTP program or Cpanel.
  2. Locate a file named “.maintenance”(this file may be hidden).
  3. And then, Delete it. And your readers will be able to read your blog properly.

But since upgrading failed, I was unable to log into my wordpress dashboard and it showed an error – “Call to undefined function get_file_data() in /home/xxxx/public_html/wp-admin/includes/plugin.php on line 81″

Now to quickly fix it:

  1. Access your site files again through Cpanel or a FTP program and go to the plugin folder of your wordpress blog.
  2. Rename that folder so that it will appear “_plugin”
  3. Now you will able to log into your wordpress dashboard

Once done; Try again to upgrade your wordpress version using autoupgrade and it could be successful. Now all you have to do is Delete the newly created “plugin” folder and then rename that folder back to “plugin” which we renamed “_plugin” in above Step 2.

Then you can experience the full functions of WordPress 2.9 properly.

I will stongly suggest you to get upgraded your wordpress to version 2.9 and experience better wordpress experience. Let me know what do you think about new wordpress? Have you upgraded to it? Did you face any kind of problem?


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116 thoughts on “WordPress 2.9 “Carmen”: What’s New & Problems You Could Face”

  1. Today afternoon only i downloaded “Carmen” One of my friend also reminded me about backup upgrading… You have also mentioned about it…Both Global undo/trash feature and image editor attracted me much… Definitely i will check it out. Thanks for explaining about carmen in detail
    .-= Deepika´s last blog ..How To Comment On Other Blogs =-.

      2. You can start from the latest version, worpdress is very user friendly. When I first encounter wordpress, no one taught me how to use it, i learned it myself very easy. I’m sure you can learn how to use it easily too.
        .-= Jenn´s last blog ..MOVED! =-.

          1. Yeah, there will be surely some minor version coming of this series in later days.

            Now the next big update is v3.0 which will be coming around Spring season…

          3. WordPress always update it’s version to make sure that they’re giving the best service for their clients, but don’t worry, it’s always for better.
            .-= Jenn´s last blog ..MOVED! =-.

      1. WordPress always releases beta version of their upcoming stable version so that wordpress developers can try it on and let wordpress know about any possible bug/problem related to it. When the stable version is launched, WordPress awards them by saying them a Thanks by linking their name to their website/blogs at the official blog post of version launch.

          4. Me too will be afraid to try new things at the very first… But my friend says we have learn from our mistakes. Try to do everything my yourself. This will teach you experience. So now a days i am following that.

  2. today i upgraded to latest version 2.9 without facing any problem, and yes backup is most important and one more thing deactivate all plugin because some time some of plugin not supporting latest version and it giving some problem so deactivate plugin and the upgrade, now i am playing with latest cool features of 2.9,

    1. Ooh. I didn’t know I need to deactivate plugins before upgrading but anyway, I had no problems when I automatically upgrade it early this morning.
      .-= Jenn´s last blog ..MOVED! =-.

          1. Yeah while installing plugin for the second time there will be waste of time. Instead we can deacitvate it before upgrading. This is not very difficult and it is also very safe.

        2. All you have to do it to back up your site to ensure that you won’t lost any of your files if ever you had a problem upgrading and it is advised that you deactivate plugins incase it is not compatible to the new version of wordpress.
          .-= Jenn´s last blog ..MOVED! =-.

  4. I’m new to wordpress but could see straight away the power of using it as a CMS… so I began.
    Lots of things to learn, even how to set it up by creating a database etc, but I persevered.
    Cpanel made life much easier and there are so many wordpress sites out there, it’s easy to get lots of help and build up a working knowledge.

    Then it began… security problems with version 2.8 must upgrade to 2.8.1 then 2.8.2… finally ended at 2.8.6!

    It’s been OK for a while but now it’s back, 2.9 is out.

    Do I need a trash feature or an image editor? Who knows but all this upgrading is time consuming and annoying.

    I’ve written this, not just to have a moan but to let you see things from the perspective of a newcomer to wordpress.

    If these were major security upgrades I could understand it, but for a trash can and an image editor!
    .-= Keith Davis@Public speaking and Presentation Skills´s last blog ..The eyes have it! =-.

        1. Many bloggers like to present articles with pictures and videos. Videos and pictures will convey our messages very well.. So it will be useful for bloggers who are interested in pictures and videos. This version is effective for them
          .-= Deepika´s last blog ..Importance Of Guest Blogging =-.

  5. I didn’t know that there is already new version of wordpress so the moment I read this post I upgraded my wordpress blog to 2.9 and I’m glad that I encounter no problem. I’m happy with it’s new features and all!
    .-= Jenn´s last blog ..MOVED! =-.

  6. I just upgraded to the latest vesion of wordpress (2.9) on my blog successfully. New version looks more promising and has lots of useful features which we were missing in the earlier versions of wordpress like image editing and thrash folder for coments

  7. Well I just upgraded to wordpress 2.9. I got no errors while upgradin, thank god. Also I ve not noticed these changes. The best thing I like is batch upgrade of plugins. I often wished it should be like that since I dont like having clicking each time the plugin upgrade.
    .-= Senthil Ramesh´s last blog ..25 Google Wave Invites for Grabs =-.

          2. Yes, they develop their service little by little. They cannot just give out a simple version they come out with a super advance. Just little by little so that customers will get used of the platform.

  9. These new features a great. I’m going to upgrade mine. By the way, more often than not, the autoupgrade doe not seem to work because of the activated plugins. What I do is deactivate all my plugins before upgrading. Works all the time. 🙂

          3. Its a must that we have to back up all our files before upgrading new version. Few of my friends lost their blog during this updation and still they are working on it. So be sure that you back up your files regularly.
            .-= Deepika´s last blog ..Importance Of Guest Blogging =-.

  10. Hey you’ve got my pic out there, thanx for that one, well the wordpress 2.9 roxx to the core. I haven’t used WordPress much i will be as i’ve planning to transfer my blog within the end of december. And there is one more good news, my exams are over, yesterday was home rule, today is poorna swaraj.

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