I have spend some time today to update my wordpress to the new 2.6 version! It has been officially released a week ago, and almost a month ahead of schedule.

Wordpress 2.6 contants a number of new features that make it a more powerful CMS. That means we can also track changes to every posts, pages and easily post from anywhere on the web and dozens of incremental improvements to the features introduced in version 2.5.

One of the most interesting things was that the “Press This” bookmarklet (you can add to your toolbar that provides a fast and smart popup to do posts to your WordPress blog) has some nifty autodetection which will make it easy to automatically embed content from YouTube and Flickr! For example, when I click “Press This” from a YouTube page it will magically extract the video embed code, and if I do it on a Flickr page it will make you easier to put the image in the post.

Here are some of the smaller features and improvements in 2.6:

• Word count! Never guess how many words are in your post anymore.
• Image captions, so you can add sweet captions like Political Ticker does under your images.
• Bulk management of plugins.
• A completely revamped image control to allow for easier inserting, floating, and resizing. It’s now fully integrated with the WYSIWYG.
• Drag-and-drop reordering of Galleries.
• Plugin update notification bubble.
• Customizable default avatars.
• You can now upload media when in full-screen mode.
• Remote publishing via XML-RPC and APP is now secure (off) by default, but you can turn it on easily through the options screen.
• Full SSL support in the core, and the ability to force SSL for security.
• You can now have many thousands of pages or categories with no interface issues.
• Ability to move your wp-config file and wp-content directories to a custom location, for “clean” SVN checkouts.
• Select a range of checkboxes with “shift-click.”
• You can toggle between the Flash uploader and the classic one.
• A number of proactive security enhancements, including cookies and database interactions.
• Stronger better faster versions of TinyMCE, jQuery, and jQuery UI.
• Version 2.6 fixes approximately 194 bugs.

If you are a theme authors, there were also improved support for SSL and some other new helper functions which will be useful for you.

I’ve been using Wordpress since 2004 and it is the bEST blogging platform ever! Download Wordpress 2.6 here!

Popularity: 12% [?]

A message is posted at Wordpress Dashboard that an upgraded Version of 2.3 “Dexter” (named for the great tenor saxophonist Dexter Gordon) is ready for the world! The new release includes native tagging support, plugin update notification, URL handling improvements, advanced WYSIWYG and much more.

1. Native tagging support allows you to use tags in addition to categories on your post, if you so choose. We’ve included importers for the Ultimate Tag Warrior, Jerome’s Keywords, Simple Tags, and Bunny’s Technorati Tag plugins so if you’ve already been using a tagging plugin you can bring your data into the new system. The tagging system is also wicked-fast, so your host won’t mind.
2. Our new update notification lets you know when there is a new release of WordPress or when any of the plugins you use has an update available. It works by sending your blog URL, plugins, and version information to our new api.wordpress.org service which then compares it to the plugin database and tells you what the latest and greatest is you can use.
3. We’ve cleaned up URLs a bunch in a feature we call canonical URLs which does things like enforce your no-www preference, redirect posts with changed slugs so a link never goes bad, redirect URLs that get cut off in emails on similar to the correct post, and much more. This helps your users, and it also helps your search engine optimization, as search engines like for each page to be available in one canonical location. More info here.
4. Our new pending review feature will be great for multi-author blogs. It allows authors to submit a post for review by an editor or administrator, where before they would just have to save a draft and hope someone noticed it.
5. There is new advanced WYSIWYG functionality (we call it the kitchen sink button) that allows you to access some features of TinyMCE that were previously hidden.

Popularity: 44% [?]