I just got home from Christmas shopping and my SVN pull down of the trunk was 3.0-alpha.  Which told me 2.9 is released and I should switch to the 2.9 branch.

As always it’s just

cd wordpress-directory
svn sw http://core.svn.wordpress.org/tags/2.9/

And that’s it. I’m now on the 2.9 branch.

I’ve been using the 2.9 beta for a few weeks now and what I think will make this release a success is that it looks almost 100% identical to 2.8. Change on the back end is well recieved; change the UI and it’s an open revolt…

The WordPress user base can be a fickle group and each release brings a set of complaints.  I have not had any incompatible plugins (and I never do) but new releases always brings “issues”.

You can read up on the official notice here.

List of changed files

When ever a new release comes out, people want to know which files changed.  With every major release it’s always a lot and going from 2.8.6 to 2.9 really means do the whole thing. It’s 286 modified files that are different from 2.8.6 to 2.9.

Running this command got me the output.

$ svn diff --old=http://core.svn.wordpress.org/tags/2.8.6 --new=http://core.svn.wordpress.org/tags/2.9 | grep ^Index | sed -e's/^Index: //' > wordpress-286-29.txt
$ cat wordpress-286-29.txt | wc -l
286
$

You can view that list of changed files I created here. Also visit the codex link on 2.9, it’s a good description of what got in and what didn’t.