// July 16th, 2008 // No Comments » // The Internet
The new version of WordPress was released today. WordPress 2.6 a number of new features that “make WordPress a more powerful CMS”. The new version allows users to track changes to every post, and also includes updates to features that were introduced in the previous version 2.5.
As explained on the WordPress website, the follow updates have been made to version 2.6:
Post Revisions: Wiki-like tracking of edits
With the power of modern computers, it’s silly that we still use save and editing metaphors from the time when the most common method of storage was floppy disks. WordPress has always respected the importance of your writing with auto-save, and now we’re taking that to another level by allowing you to view who made what changes when to any post or page through a super-easy interface, much like Wikipedia or a version control system.
This is handy on any blog in case you make a mistake and want to go back to an older version of a post, and it’s super handy for multi-author blogs where you can see every change tracked by person.
Press This!: Post from wherever you are on the web
A few months ago on my blog we started a conversation about the posting bookmarklet in WordPress and which systems we should look to for inspiration, like Flock, FriendFeed, Facebook, Tumblr, and Delicious. From these suggestions and the Quick Post plugin by Josh Kenzer, we developed a Press This bookmark you can add to your toolbar that provides a fast and smart popup to do posts to your WordPress blog:
For example, if you click “Press This” from a Youtube page it’ll magically extract the video embed code, and if you do it from a Flickr page it’ll make it easy for you to put the image in your post. On my blog I’ve been experimenting with using different categories and the in_category() function — such as video, quote, aside, et cetera — to create a more tumblelog-like format.
Shift Gears: Turbo-speed your blogging
Gears is an open source browser extension project started by Google that developers like us can use to give you features we wouldn’t normally be able to. There are a lot of things we can do with Gears in the future, but in this release we’ve stuck to using what’s called a “Local Server” to cache or keep a copy of commonly-used Javascript and CSS files on your computer, which can speed up the loading of some pages by several seconds (they just pop right up!). You can install Gears for Firefox or Internet Explorer, with support for Safari and Opera pending. WordPress works just fine without it, you just get a little extra juice when you have it installed.
Theme Previews: See it before your audience does
Now when you select a theme it pops up a window that shows the theme live with all your content, instead of immediately making it active on your site. This is great for just test driving themes before making a switch over publicly, and it is also helpful when you are developing a theme and need to test it but don’t want everybody to see your ongoing mistakes development.
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.
This is my first post using the new version, so I cannot comment on whether the changes worth the upgrade, but I cannot see any reason not to.
The upgrade to version 2.6 is fairly simple. It just requires FTP access so you can upload the new files, and then the first time you log into your admin account, it will prompt you to upgrade the database. Just make sure you backup your existing version just in case you have any issues!
Happy blogging!
