WordPress: 2.9 Release Candidate 1

For those of you looking to get you hands on the next major release, WordPress 2.9 RC1 is ready for download. Generally not suggested for live blogs unless you know what you are doing. No matter, a release candidate as opposed to a beta development software, I reckon it should be quite safe to implement.

From the WordPress Blog:

Posted December 16, 2009 by Matt. Filed under Development.
We’re at that exciting point in WordPress development where the dev team feels like version 2.9 is complete and ready for the world.
If you’ve been waiting for your moment to pitch in, it’s now. First we need tech savvy testers to upgrade their blogs and kick the tires, make sure everything is rolling like you expect it to. Here’s a list of all the fun and geeky new stuff in 2.9 to try out. Second, and more importantly, we need everyone to test out their plugin compatibility.
If you’re a user of plugins, there’s a groovy new compatibility feature on the plugin directory where you can vote on whether a plugin is compatible with a version or not and it’ll get registered in the new plugin compatibility checker. This is as a replacement to the old wiki-based lists we’d do before. To see it in action check out this Akismet plugin page, as you can see 14 people have already registered that it’s compatible with 2.9.
If you’re a plugin author, of course you should update your “Tested up to:” in the readme.txt for your plugin.
If all goes according to plan, WordPress 2.9 will be out before the end of the week. You can download the release candidate here.
For more details on the changes since Beta please review the revision log on Trac, and happy testing!