Blizzard announced today that the World of Warcraft expansion The Burning Crusade will be distributed in two different versions: a standard and a collector's edition . The Collector's Edition box will contain the game in both CD and DVD format, a behind the scenes DVD, an art book, two World of Warcraft collectible card game starter packs, a mouse pad with the map of Outland and The Burning Crusade soundtrack on a CD.
In addition, players with the Collector's Edition will be able to call an exclusive in game pet, the Netherwhelp.

No, we don't have it yet, but a Blizzard employee confirmed on the official forums that The Burning Crusade release is still expected in the fourth quarter of 2006 "We are still saying it will be Q4 of 2006 at this point with no specific date to give yet. We're doing just fine. Don't you worry your pretty little head! ;)".

Patch 1.12.1 is being applied now on european and american World of Wacraft servers, changing the cost of mounts and the purpose of the riding skill.

World of Warcraft, 25th September 2006. Players are opening GM tickets to complain about the one hour long queues to enter the game only to get an answer very similar to "We are aware of the problem. Rest assured that we are doing our best to solve it as fast as possible. Anything else I can help you with?"

After publishing the Burning Crusade updated talent trees for most of the other classes, Blizzard finally gave out some informations about the priest class . The new last level powers are very interesting.

This page at the World of Warcraft official website shows without doubts that a new patch is under development. Even if we still don't have any details about it, most of the people tend to agree on the fact that this patch should mainly consist in a preparation for the Burning Crusade push.
 
Do you agree? What do you think this patch will be about? Share your thoughts with us on our new forums !

From this WOW webpage not linked anywhere but available to everyone, Blizzard seems to have called employees' "friends and family" to alpha test the incoming expansion The Burning Crusade.

The World of Warcraft patch 1.12 also known as Drums of War is being pushed now on production servers. The client patch is 16Mb big. Here are the complete patch notes.

On the official WOW Forums a sticky post warn us that: We have implemented a hotfix to all realms during today's maintenance which we had originally scheduled to release with patch 1.12 that changes the functionality of temporary item buffs (e.g. poisons, sharpening stones and shaman weapon buffs.) While we only just recently allowed the affects of these temporary item buffs to persist upon zoning and logging out, due to the extra demand it was placing on our hardware we've decided that for the time being, it was best to revert the change. We do anticipate this functionality will be available again once the anticipated hardware upgrades have been completed in preparation for the Burning Crusade's release.