• Trash – you can now move posts and comments to the trash instead of deleting them outright. This may help those of you who have a habit of dealing with comment management en-masse, and when you accidentally delete that comment you wanted to keep!
• Post thumbnails – adding an image for posts is now a lot easier for you designers, with the long-awaited feature finally making its appearance.
• Enhancements to templating – you can now set category-specific, page-specific and tag-specific templates using either the slug or ID of the item you want to template. A thousand template designers just jumped for joy!
• MySQL requirement has gone from v4.0 to v4.1.2 to generally improve performance and reliability.
• A new image editor means you can crop images you upload in the back end of Wordpress – a boon for those on the move.
• Embedding content will be made easier through the use of oEmbed.
• All this, along with the whole raft of performance improvements and bug fixes, along with new functionality!

You can get Wordpress 2.9 RC1 from Wordpress.org today, so give it a whirl!