It’s been a great year for Theme Lab, the community, and WordPress in general. We’ve seen a number of innovations, such as the Builder theme by iThemes. We’ve seen some cool new WordPress-related sites like WP Questions and WP Chat.

Being the end of the year, I thought I’d take this opportunity to highlight some of the best content here at Theme Lab this past year. Without further ado…

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It was announced recently that WordPress 2.9 has been released. There are a few cool new features, which I’ll list below:

• Built-in image editing – This feature allows you to do basic image editing to your uploads, including cropping, resizing, rotating, among other things.
• Easier embedded content – Using the oEmbed standard, embedding content can now be as simple as pasting a URL. Support for YouTube, DailyMotion, Flickr, WordPress.tv, among many others.
• Global trash feature – The Delete button is now replaced with a Trash button, giving you a second chance to recover posts or comments you would have otherwise deleted by accident.
• Bulk plugin upgrade – Now you’re able to bulk upgrade plugins automatically, instead of upgrading one by one. On top of that, it now takes advantage of the community-powered plugin compatibility data from the plugin directory.

The video below covers these features in more detail.

I’ve upgraded a few of my sites to 2.9 with no issues. Regardless, make sure you backup your site beforehand. If for some reason automatic upgrade doesn’t work, you can still upgrade manually.

Has anyone else tried WordPress 2.9? Let me know what you think in the comments.

Spectacu.la, a WordPress theme club, has just announced the release of their free threaded comments plugin for WordPress. Basically what this plugin does is replace your theme’s comments template with a new one, generated by the plugin.

In addition to that, you also get pagination and jQuery based roll up of subordinate comments. For those who remember the old Theme Lab which used Brian’s Threaded Comments plugin, it’s kind of like that, except neater.

The plugin should work on almost any theme, even if it normally doesn’t support threaded comments, provided it uses the comments_template() call.

Pictured above is the light and dark styles of the comments which are included in the plugin. Read on to check out my screencast which demonstrates these two styles on a really old theme that wasn’t originally designed to support threaded comments.

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