By Senior Editor – Kris Smith (@croncast)

WordPress 2.9 is now street legal and straight outta beta for the masses.

You’ve probably read about the full release already and that is a good thing. You might have even read my review of the beta.

It’s true that I wasn’t that excited with this what I was seeing. The beta was much of the same old stuff. The full release, yes, the same with some catchy features for the less savvy users. A good move.

Now that WordPress has the newbs and graphicsprogramiphobes covered, it is time to get on with 3.0 and I hope it is a great departure from the current release.

I wrote a post about what I’d like to see in WordPress 3.0 a month ago or so, but lets talk about it some more.

1. Simplify the options

Currently there are too many options that appear in the left hand navigation when a publisher is writing a post. A contextual menu system that displays navigation items when needed would help out even the most advanced user.

2. Simply the posting process

There is an ability to produce a quick post inline on the dashboard but nothing like that in main admin. Would be a nice option.

3. Simply theming

No exception to the rule, WordPress often integrates the best of the open source plugins that authors produce for it. But some of the best of these get left on the table and remain plug-ins. Themes haven’t had much of this treatment and deserve it. There are elements of themes and options, like those for auto-thumbnails that could be added to the codebase and used as hooks for themes.

Congratulations to the entire WordPress team for rolling this new version 2 update out the door. There are plenty of shimmers of what will come in version 3.0.

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