WordPress 2.6 is Peeping In!

It has been quite a few months while the stable version of WordPress, WP 2.51 has been around. Though there have been bugs and patches for them in a timeline, but somehow I have been satisfied with the way WordPress has evolved as the leading publishing platform. Some of the prominent bugs in the current stable release were reportedly:

• The Internet Explorer issue
• Error with the File Editor
• Auto save problem, etc.

You can find a lot of bugs currently being tracked and reported at WordPress trac. If interested, you may also submit the bugs you think you’ve tracked down. It’s another great way to learn!

The next release of WP is a beta1 release and is available for download here. If you’re interested in a stable version, I would request you to wait for the final release. Talking about the prominent changes in WP 2.6, the best ones include Post Revisions, which saves a history of edits made to a post, and support for Gears, which speeds up working with the admin screens to a great extend.

Other salient features of WP 2.6 b1 include:

• XMLRPC mechanism for listing and deleting media resources easily and efficiently.
• Admin SSL Support to allow visiting the admin over http or https with an option to force https.
• Support for the XML-RPC and Atom client APIs is turned off by default now. In order to use an external client for posting, you’ll need to turn these features on, under Settings/Writing section of the panel.
• While selecting themes, you now get to view a preview of how your site looks with the new theme before applying the change. This Theme preview feature is similar to the one at WordPress.com.
• The Gravatar service now also supports MonsterID, Wavatar, or Identicon icons in place of the default icon for those who do not have a Gravatar for them. You may select these options under Settings/Discussion.
• The plugin plugin management has been improved a lot. Active and inactive plugins are now listed separately. You may now ‘bulk activate’ or ‘bulk deactivate’ plugins. The unused plugins may now be deleted with the click of a button.
• A ‘Press This’ bookmarklet for quick posting, something similar to tumblelog.
• You may now relocate your content directory.
• You can also move wp-config.php, out of the root folder of your website.
• WP now has a word counter within the inbuilt editor. This is a blessing in disguise for writer who need to concentrate on words before publishing.
• The image editing dialog is improved over the previous versions. It now gives a lot of control over the images you embed in the posts.
• TinyMCE 3.1.0.1 with lots of bug fixes.
• WP has the latest jQuery 1.2.6 and jQuery UI 1.5 which provide some cool performance boost!

Now that was more than one could have asked them! WordPress is growing big and that too pretty fast. You may download and upgrade your current WP installation. For the professional blogs, I would however recommend to wait for the final release of WP 2.6 which shall anyhow be more stable.

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5 Comments »

Comment by Sujit

2008-06-27 20:37:40

Great new for wordpress fans including me.Can’t wait to download stable version.When are they releasing it?

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Comment by Kay Kastum

2008-06-27 21:29:59

They are moving at the speed of light!

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Pingback by The art of "no-follow" links: WP Plugin | Blog SEO

2008-06-28 06:12:33

[...] Talking about compatibility with WP versions, the plugin works only with WordPress 2.5+. So, incase you’re running an older version of WordPress, you need to upgrade it. You may like to try out the latest beta release, we talked about in the previous post - WordPress 2.6 is peeping in! [...]

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Comment by Praval Singh

2008-06-28 20:18:03

@ Sujit: You need to keep an eye on them! They’ve surprised me with news pretty often. Let’s hope the next one is round the corner, somewhere near!

@Kay Kastum: Indeed! Pretty fast and smooth.

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Comment by Michael

2008-06-29 08:12:08

Thanks for listing all the features. I’ve been using the beta successfully for a few days.

I hadn’t noticed the word count until reading this. I really like the new plugin management.

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