While I was browsing through my Twitter feed over the weekend, I was delighted to find that WordPress 2.9 Carmen is now officially available and removed of its previous beta status. If you’re curious to know about its tag “Carmen”, it is actually named in honor of Carmen McRae, a jazz vocalist whose music was added to Last.fm WP release station.

As with other major releases, you can upgrade your version by accessing your Dashboard and going to Tools > Upgrade, or alternatively downloading from WordPress.org.

A video to give you better insight to 2.9 Carmen:

The cooler features to note with 2.9 :

1. Global Undo/”Trash” feature, this is a huge relief for me as I ponder my questionable posts and hit delete, only to realize I want it back. No need for shooting myself in the foot when I want to retrieve it, now that I can get it back from the trash. (Very useful for the indecisive.

2. Built-in Image Editor will be baked into WordPress 2.9 and would not require a plugin. You can crop, edit, rotate, flip and scale your images. (This I really like, you can’t hold my attention with just words. I like to naively believe that a “picture painting a thousand words” is a universally applicable preference.)

3. Batch plugin Update and compatibility checking, which means you can update your plugins at one go, rather than to do multiple clicks for each one. Other than that, WordPress utilizes its compatibility data to ensure your plugins are suitable with new releases of WordPress. Definitely more useful and less time consuming for Administrators.

4. Easier Video Embeds feature, where you just paste the URL of the video and it will magically be embedded in your post. (Supports YouTube, Daily Motion, Blip.tv, Flickr, Hulu, Viddler, Qik, Revision3, Scribd, Google Video, Photobucket, PollDaddy, WordPress.tv and more to come.)

These are most useful in my user-end books but there are more enhancements to view here.

Do take a look, and give us some feedback when you’ve tried out the features!