As expected, we’ll see major enhancements to the way WordPress handles media files. Beta-testing v2.9 RC-1, I’ve seen those cool new features, such as on-the-fly image editing (crop, rotate, flip, resize), and more meta data (separate alt caption texts), among others.

What I’ve been wanting for the longest time, which will now be available in v2.9, is a gallery option that lets you exclude images from being displayed when using the [gallery] shortcode. Sometimes it’s necessary to display a post’s gallery of images, but with one or a few images left out. For example, you have a restaurant review post with a number of foodnographic shots, plus the logo of the restaurant. You might want to display the food photos as thumbnails (gallery-style), but without the resto logo, which you’ll probably place at the top of the post.

For this purpose, WP2.9 will let you use the exclude switch inside the shortcode. Problem is — and I hope they fix this — this is to be inserted manually into the [gallery] shortcode; no menu item for this yet in the gallery’s user interface. And, the usage is still rather cryptic. After a brief hit-and-miss session, I finally figured out that the value that the exclude option accepts is the post ID of the image (not the post’s ID where the image is attached). To wit:

[gallery exclude="##"]
(For excluding multiple images: separate ## values with a comma.)

WordPress stores images’ meta data in the wp_posts database table (assuming you didn’t change the WP prefix in wp-config.php), so that each uploaded image gets its own unique ID. There is as yet no way to see images’ IDs within WordPress — I had to browse the database table via PHPMyAdmin to check for them.

(There is also an include switch, and I suppose this is for manually including images attached to other posts.)

What’s more, v2.9 will now have a recycle bin for posts, pages, attachments and comments. How many times have you deleted a post or a comment and regretted it?

There are a host of enhancements and additions to this awesomest of content management systems, some major and some cosmetic (including a much-improved default first post upon installation). RC-1 is pretty stable already, so if you’re feeling adventurous, why don’t you download and play around with it now?

Kudos to Automattic for an exciting new version!

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