The WordPress development team has announced the immediate availability of version 2.2 “Getz” for download. This version, named in honor of tenor saxophonist Stan Getz, includes a number of new features, most notably Widgets integration, and over two hundred bug fixes.

WordPress has become popular among podcasters as a free tool for publishing blogs, podcasts and video podcasts.

New features:

• WordPress Widgets allow you to easily rearrange and customize areas of your weblog (usually sidebars) with drag-and-drop simplicity. This functionality was originally available as a plugin Widgets are now included by default in the core code, significantly cleaned up, and enabled for the default themes.
• Full Atom support, including updating our Atom feeds to use the 1.0 standard spec and including an implementation of the Atom Publishing API to complement our XML-RPC interface.
• A new Blogger importer that is able to handle the latest version of Google’s Blogger product and seamlessly import posts and comments without any user interaction beyond entering your login.
• Infinite comment stream, meaning that on your Edit Comments page when you delete or spam a comment using the AJAX links under each comment it will bring in another comment in the background, so you always have 20 items on the page.
• Protection from activating a plugin or editing a file that will break your blog.
• Core plugin and filter speed optimizations should make everything feel a bit more snappy and lighter on your server.
• Hooks added for WYSIWYG support in a future version of Safari.

In addition, there were also dozens of UI and accessibility improvements, ranging from more concise wording around options and links to things like a view and preview link above the content box when you’re editing a post or page.

WordPress is a free download and is open source.