WordPress 2.1 has been released. There’s a heap of updates which I’m not going to re-list here, check out the post on the WordPress blog for the full list.

A couple of things stand out for me, as a developer, that will be really handy:

• You can set any “page” to be the front page of your site, and put the latest posts somewhere else, making it much easier to use WordPress as a content management system.
• Pseudo-cron functionality let’s you schedule events much like cron.
• The new WP_Error class cleans up how we do error reporting and handling.
• Image and thumbnail API allows for richer media plugins.

That first point I think will be a bigger change than people think.  It will, very simply, allow people to use WordPress to maintain an entire site, not just a blog within a site.  Deane over at Gadgetopia will probably find this interesting too. (Update: Told you!)

I’ll be upgrading in the next day or so & see what all the changes actually mean.  Unfortunately I haven’t had the time recently to check whether my plugins work with 2.1, but they’re fairly self-contained, so hopefully it should be ok.  Once I install Ella I’ll check them out and release any updates as needed.

Check out the official release post for the full list of updates, and check out Aaron Brazell’s 10 things you should know about WordPress 2.1 post that I mentioned yesterday for some more detailed information on some of the changes.