WordPress Enthusiasts have a reason to rejoice. WP 2.9 will be out in a couple of weeks. There are a host of changes planned.
Major new features for developers:
- comments meta table
- improved support for custom post types
- register_theme_directory() for additional theme locations
- back-ported JSON encode/decode for both PHP and JavaScript

and for users:
- oEmbed support
- “Trash” for posts, pages and comments (Delete/Recover from Trash: Quite like Joomla)
- post thumbnails support
- basic image editor

The Whole list of planned changes can be seen on the official page