It has not been long since the release of WordPress 2.5 which had a lot of big changes from all previous versions. WordPress version 2.6 is now available and anyone who has made the, often painful move to version 2.5 should not have any issues going to version 2.6.

I admit I haven’t upgraded any of my live blogs to even version 2.5 yet but have done so for others and have experienced some plugin compatibility issues. But I know it is only a matter of time so I will be going through the process shortly and post about the “gotchas” I experience.

Some of the changes in Version 2.6 are:

Post Revisions: Wiki-like tracking of edits:
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 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.

Shift Gears: Turbo-speed your blogging:
There are a lot of things that can be done with Gears in future releases of WordPress, but this release will be 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:
This one has had a few people confused who were familiar with previous versions of WordPress. Now from the Design menu when clicking a theme it will open in a popup preview so you can see it before it is “live”. If you want to use the theme there is an Activate Theme link on the preview screen or an X to close the preview and not use the theme.

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.

Here is a video version of the changes provided by the WordPress developers:

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