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: 18% [?]

Find out what I am doing right now by following me on Twitter! If you like this post then please consider subscribing to my full feed RSS. You can also subscribe by Email and have new posts sent directly to your inbox.