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.

A lot of us dread to upgrade our software because of messages just like this

your attempt to edit this post has failed

Most often it is due to an incompatibility with a plugin. It appears that is the problem here as well. The very popular plugin Twitter Tools is the most likely culprit. If you see this message when you first try to save or publish a post in WordPress 2.9, the first thing you want to do is to de-activate the Twitter Tools plugin. That cleared up the problem for me.

A few people have reported this error with the All in One SEO plugin as well but it has not caused a problem on any of the 12 blogs that I manage. If you continue to have problems, deactivate ALL of your plugins. Then try to save a new post. If that works, reactivate your plug-ins until you find the source of your trouble.

What happened to WordPress 2.9 checking for plug-in compatibility? Well WordPress 2.9 does and lots of people have had no problems with the Twitter Tool plug in on their WordPress 2.9 blog. Alex King, the developer of Twitter Tools is hard with the WordPress developers trying to isolate the cause. I can tell you that this is one of the most difficult times to debug, when something works for most set ups but not for a small group of others.

Should I upgrade?

WordPress 2.9 is a feature upgrade. It is not a security upgrade, which should ALWAYS be installed as soon as possible. You could wait a week or so for some of the dust to settle before upgrading. Many people will make that choice if it is a feature vs security upgrade, as it is in this situation. You can wait and take one of the blogging classes that start after the new year to have my assistance and guidance when you upgrade. Check out Blogging Basics and Blogging for Fun, Fame and Fortune to see which class is the best fit for you.