WordPress 2.9 has been eagerly anticipated by bloggers seeking image management improvements. WP 2.9 does boast some cool new image tools but as Matt Mullenweg points out:

This is the first wave of our many planned media-handling improvements.

In other words, like a kid the day after Christmas, I can choose to delight in what I did get or I can lament about what didn’t end up in my stocking. Don’t worry, there is plenty to appreciate in WordPress 2.9.

The new image features in WordPress 2.9 will please those of you that love to populate your blogs with lots of images. Now you can do some rudimentary image editing such as cropping, rotating, flipping and scaling, all inside of WordPress. They have also made the built in image gallery much easier to use by allowing you to easily add images from other blog posts to this image gallery.  Dynamic image resizing and more image functions will be implemented in WordPress 3.0, which is scheduled for late spring.

But some of the coolest things about this version of WordPress 2.9 may not be readily apparent to the basic user. That is because a lot of the changes are “under the hood” and are were implemented to make it easier for WordPress developers and theme designers to do some really cool things. Expect some development delay until these new plug ins and themes are ready for distribution. I am pretty excited about the possibilities!

As with many new releases on a complex program, there have been some glitches for some people in upgrading. Most of these issues are related to running PHP 4 instead of PHP5 on your web server.  PHP 4 is no longer supported but many web hosts have been reluctant to upgrade to the current version of PHP. Other people are having problems with some plugins, particularly Twitter Tools.  WordPress is working hard on a patch so expect WP 2.9.1 in the next couple of days.