Few hours back i had posted about the Wordpress 2.9 RC1 version and now its live.That was fast i must say ! Matt released the final version of Wordpress 2.9 “Carmen”.This is named in honor of magical jazz vocalist Carmen Mcrae.You can upgrade easily from your Dashboard by going to Tools > Upgrade, or you can download from WordPress.org.

What’s improved

• rel=canonical support for better SEO.
• There is automatic database optimization support, which you can enable in your wp-config.php file by adding define(‘WP_ALLOW_REPAIR’, true);.
• Themes can register “post thumbnails” which allow them to attach an image to the post, especially useful for magazine-style themes.
• 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.
• Custom post types have been upgraded with better API support so you can juggle more types than just post, page, and attachment.
• 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.
• Upgraded TinyMCE WYSIWYG editing and Simplepie.
• Sidebar widgets can now have descriptions so it’s more obvious what and where they do what they do.
• 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.
• 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.
• The XML-RPC API has been extended to allow changing the user registration option.Also fixed some Atom API attachment issues.
• Create custom galleries with the new include and exclude attributes that allow you to pull attachments from any post, not just the current one.
• 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.
• 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.
• Custom taxonomies are now included in the WXR export file and imported correctly.
• Better hooks and filters for excerpts, smilies, HTTP requests, user profiles, author links, taxonomies, SSL support, tag clouds, query_posts and WP_Query

All of this and more is reflected in the over 500 tickets, bugs, and enhancements tested and fixed.I am totally loving the features.Just downloaded Wordpress 2.9 installing it locally using xampp in few hours.Need some sleep Phew ! In the mean time go download Carmen.