FunBlog

Wordpress 2.6 is now available. This version has fixed lot of bugs and has come up with a number of new and good features that make WordPress a more powerful blogging platform. With 2.6 you can now track changes to every post/page and easily post from wherever you are on the web. Plus there are dozens of incremental improvements to the features introduced in version 2.5. If you are using WordPress, I advise you to upgrade it to Wordpress 2.6 now.

Couple of Cool features:

• Theme preview: Theme preview functionality (a pop up window) that allows you to see what a new theme would look like live with all your content on your blog before you activate it.
• Google Gears support: A new feature that makes use of Google Gear to store the WordPress images, scripts and CSS files on your local machine to speed up the page loading time and making offline posting a possible and pleasure. (How cool would that be)
• Plug-in page: You can see a bubble on the top of Plug-ins link. It lets you know the number of plug-in updates available without actually going to the page.
• Custom Avatars: The ability to select a default avatar for those who don’t have their own. They can either display a generic logo or a generated one based on their e-mail address.
• Post Revisions: A Wiki-style revisions management for blog posts. A cool new power-feature that WordPress allows you to check out the revisions made to your posts.
• Press This: A feature that allows you post in your wordpress blog from wherever you are on the web.
• Enhanced image control/Image captions.

Some New Features Added:

• Loaded with new plugins like allow plugin installations via web interface
• 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.
• TinyMCE 3.1.0.1 with lots of bug fixes
• jQuery 1.2.6 with some nice performance improvements
• jQuery UI 1.5
• Version 2.6 fixes approximately 194 bugs.

WordPress 2.6 is pretty much identical to 2.5 from a plug-in and theme compatibility point of view, so upgrades from 2.5 should be pretty painless. The 2.5 branch will no longer be maintain so everyone is encouraged to upgrade.