The year has been an interesting one for WordPress bloggers with the release of about 5 major and incremental upgrades since the start of the year.

It’s interesting to see WordPress grow from more a GNU General Public License hobbist project, to a comprehensive solution that corporates are increasingly embracing.

The fact that new WordPress versions currently do or will eventually include native functions like:

• Email functions like (phpMailer)
• Tagging (which helps out the information sorting and relevance process in the age of info overload)
• Widgets (to expand its functions from it’s base text/graphics-information Content Management System publishing origins)
• XML-RPC APIs for otherwise static “Pages” as distinguished from the dynamic “Post” counterparts
• Further ATOM feed and API support for increased content distribution syndication

These initiatives give WordPress a big step up from other more Web1.0 corporate-oriented blogging platforms.

And ultimately it’s about choice. If you choose to do a cotton candy blog featuring Youtube videos you can do it just as easily as disseminating information on service uptimes and kernel updates via a corporate blog.

Even if your favorite features like tags aren’t natively supported in WordPress now, you can easily add the functions by installing the appropriate plugin. The techset is figuring out the next big thing too.

I’m keeping my fingers crossed to see native support for audio and video content. We might see it sooner than we think.

Also check out:

• WordPress 2.2 features
• WordPress 2.2 milestones
• WordPress Dev team’s Dougal WordPress 2.2 post
• Lorelle on WordPress: WordPress 2.2 Delay

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