Blogging Just Got Easier: Release of WordPress 2.9

I’ve been a fan of WordPress for several years because the development team has always managed to strike a perfect balance between the needs of a site developer like me and the needs of the site owner who needs to be able to make updates to the content of the site. Most site owners are not web developers themselves, so they need an interface that makes it easy to add pages, images, and video to their site. WordPress has make those tasks simple for years, but release 2.9 adds a few features that take this simplicity to new heights.

Embedding Video

In previous versions of WordPress, embedding video from a site like YouTube on your web page had a few extra confusing steps. You had to find the embed code on YouTube, switch from the visual editor to the HTML editor in WordPress, and the whole process felt a little clunky. Now you can just paste a link to your YouTube video into the middle of your WordPress page. When a visitor views the page, the video will automatically be embedded. Simple.

So when I edit this page, I paste in the link: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_FEyMO713-Y …but you see:

Editing Images

Gone are the days when you need to use photo editing software to crop, rotate, and resize your images before uploading them. You can now do all of those functions from right within your WordPress site.

And of course there’s also behind the scenes changes that help me as a site developer out, but you don’t care if there are better filters for query_posts and WP_Query. And the great thing about using a content management system like WordPress is you don’t have to.