Automattic released WordPress 2.9 today with a lot of simply exciting new features. There are plenty of new goodies to go around in this release for end users and for developers alike. Some folks are calling this the final release for 2009, but this is WordPress, and I’d say that 2.9.1 has better than even odds of beating the new year out the gate.

A couple of features that are going to excite most users are a new image editor, offering the ability to edit images directly in the dashboard and an embed engine that will embed media objects from popular sites like YouTube, Flickr, Scribd and several more by simply adding a link to the resource on its own line.

As for me, the most exciting changes are the improved support for custom taxonomies, custom post types and extensible user profiles. I think that these elements are going to get a lot of play in the near future and are going to represent some of the coolest new developments in WordPress design.

A lot of what went into the new features for 2.9 seems, at least partly, an attempt to free bloggers from developers to some extent. Many of the new features will make it a lot easier for novice users to add some of the more difficult, or advanced, features many of them desire to their own blogs. Other features will make developers lives easier in the long haul, but there is a lot of code that’s going to need reworking and some that needs ripping out of many of the newer and more involved themes. Just one example is added built-in support for canonical URIs. I spent a good amount of time adding this to many of my themes; now I get to spend the time yanking it back out. But really, that’s a net good. I’m not bitter at all, really.