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Wordpress 2.6 Has Been Released!

15 July 2008

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Well as of 37 minutes ago Wordpress 2.6 has been released and is now available for upgrade inside your dashboard. Woohoo or not? Im all excited because there are some cool new features in 2.6 coming out but I’m always afraid to be one of the first to upgrade for fear that everything falls apart before I can say unc.

Some of the more notable new features in 2.6 are post revisions similar to wiki style editing, Press This! button to blog from anywhere and Theme Previews to allow the admin to view a theme on their site before making it live. The smaller features are the more meaningful ones in my opinion.

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.

Whats that? Better version of TinyMCE? Absolutely awesome. There are still too many little bugs in that editor but unfortunately I’ve been unable to find anything with less problems. The Wordpress team has also completely redone the gallery and image handling when creating content. The editor is better integrated with the WYSIWYG editor.

Ive been counting down the days for this release and now that it’s out I’m going to wait. I don’t expect that there will be any major issues but I’m one of those people who like’s to sit at the sideline and laugh when someone slips and falls before helping them up. That’s kind of how I feel now so its the waiting game.

Wordpress was the first blogging system I began using and like ex-girlfriends I’ve left wp for other more flashy and attractive looking platforms only to return to my one true love. Ive gone through blogger, typepad, moveable type, drupal, joomla and plenty of others and while they all have their own unique features and stand out from one another nothing compares to Wordpress. I can honestly say that I have never had a problem with Wordpress that was unsolvable either by myself or with the help of the wp community.

I can also thank my mediocore PHP coding abilities to Wordpress and the old sloppy way of adding plugins. Until the release of widgets recently this was one of the only major features that Wordpress lacked in order to make this a completely hands-off code platform that could cater to complete beginners. Because of the old system I was forced to familiarize myself with PHP and in turn have basically self-taught myself over the years to a point where I can comfortably navigate through code and identify problems and fix them. A proud moment thanks Wordpress! I’m sure everyone remembers the set of instructions that went something like this:

Download the plugin from here (here being hyperlinked)

Unpack the plugin to a folder on your desktop

Load up your File Transfer Protocol program and log in to your server and upload the plugin folder to your wp-contents/plugins folder

Activate the plugin from your Plugins menu

Edit your sidebar.php and locate the spot where you want to put the plugin. Be careful not to delete something by accident or your entire blog will break!
Insert the following: <?php gibberish(’what_is&thisstuff=2′) ?>

Refresh your blog in your browser and pray it doesn’t break

The above 6 steps can be simplified with widgets into 5 steps.

Download the plugin from here (here being hyperlinked)

Unpack the plugin to a folder on your desktop

Load up your File Transfer Protocol program and log in to your server and upload the plugin folder to your wp-contents/plugins folder

Activate the plugin from your Plugins menu

Go to your Widgets menu and drag the widget to your sidebar. If it doesn’t work then remove the widget

And with Plugin-Central(review and link here):

Copy the URL to the ZIP of the plugin and input in directly into your dashboard. Plugin will be downloaded and activated in one step.

I love Wordpress!

The absolute best feature about Wordpress is that anything lacking in core is almost guaranteed to be readily available as a FREE plugin. Don’t forget the one-click upgrades from inside your dashboard. Priceless.

If your upgrade goes smoothly Id lve to hear about it. I am dying to get this over with.