iPassion

Version 2.6 of WordPress.org is now available, it contains a number of new features that make WordPress a more powerful CMS: you can now track changes to every post and 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.

WordPress.org provided a screencast to show all these improvements. Here it is:

Here is a brief overview of what’s new in 2.6:

Post Revisions: Wiki-like tracking of edits

WordPress already had an auto-save feature, and now it allows you to view who made what changes when to any post or page through an easy interface, much like Wikipedia or a version control system.

This is a life saver on any blog in case you make a mistake and want to go back to an older version of a post, and it’s really handy for multi-author blogs to track changes by person.

Press This!: Post from wherever you are on the web

Press This bookmark is a link 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

Gears is an open source browser extension project started by Google that developers use to give you features we wouldn’t normally be able to. What this does is 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. 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 the extra speed increase 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.

Smaller features and improvements in 2.6:

• Word count
• Image captions
• Bulk management of plugins.
• A completely revamped image control.
• 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.
• 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.