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.

Many events were announced for celebration, bue the main, official one is at 9 PM at the 111 Minna club at, you guessed it, 111 Minna in San Francisco, California.

WordPress started in 2003 with a single bit of code to enhance the typography of everyday writing and with fewer users than you can count on your fingers and toes. Since then it has grown to be the largest self-hosted blogging tool in the world, used on hundreds of thousands of sites and seen by tens of millions of people every day.

Here’s the announcement of WordPress 0.7 on May 27, 2003:

http://wordpress.org/development/2003/05/wordpress-now-available/

This event is also available on Upcoming.org:

http://upcoming.yahoo.com/event/714298

WordPress 2.5 is the culmination of six months of work by the WordPress community. A customizable dashboard, multi-file upload, built-in galleries, one-click plugin upgrades, tag management, built-in Gravatars, full text feeds, and faster load times… sound cool? Then WordPress 2.5 might be the release you’ve been waiting for to upgrade your WordPress 2 powered website!

For a brief overview of the features with screenshots, visit WordPress.org sneak peek announcement for RC1. Or check out a 4-minute screencast of the new interface in action.

But if you’re in a hurry, here is a bullet list of the major changes in this release:

• Revamped user interface, features a new fresh and better organized look and feel.
• Cleaner, faster, less cluttered dashboard with widget support (yes, you can customize it now!)
• Multi-file upload with progress bar. Now you can select a folder of images or music or videos at once and it’ll show you the progress of each upload.
• EXIF extraction — if you upload JPEG files with EXIF metadata like camera make and model, aperture, shutter speed, ISO, et al. WordPress will extract all the data into custom fields you can use in your template.
• Internal search engine now searches in both posts and pages.
• Tag management — you can now add, rename, delete, and do whatever else you like to tags from inside WordPress, no plugins needed.
• Password strength meter
• Concurrent editing protection — Now if you open a post that someone else is editing, WordPress magically locks it and prevents you from saving until the other person is done.
• One-click plugin upgrades — if the plugins you use are part of the plugin directory WordPress will be able to download and install the upgrades for you.
• Friendlier visual post editor — Includes version 3.0 of TinyMCE, which means better compatibility with Safari. New full-screen editor gets you a no-distraction area to focus on your posts.
• Built-in galleries — when you take advantage of multi-file upload to upload a bunch of photos, there is a new shortcode that lets you to easily embed galleries by just putting [ gallery ] (without the spaces) in your post. It’ll display all your thumbnails and captions and each will link each to a page where people can comment on the individual photos. Matt is using this feature on his blog and already uploaded over 1,200 pictures into 23 galleries!

There are also a number of new developer features, here is a summary:

• Salted passwords
• Secure cookies
• Easy taxonomy and URL creation
• Inline documentation
• Database optimization
• $wpdb->prepare()
• Media buttons
• Shortcode API

Want to learn more about these? Check out Matt’s original post on WordPress.org.

This plug-in for WordPress 2.x adds a tell-a-friend form that allows your visitor to send a message to their friends about your website.

UPDATE SUMMER 2009: Please note I am not actively supporting or maintaining this plug-in. Since I see there is still interest in it, I’ll hand this to some of our developers at Surgeworks. However I can’t tell you anything about a time-frame to fix this plug-in since it is not in our priorities at the moment.

UPDATE OCTOBER 2008: The distribution now incorporates the fix for All-in-one-SEO Pack (and possibly other plugins) compatibility indicated by Tim Holt

Main features

• You can specify an e-mail address that will recieve a copy of the message to get 2 e-mail addresses of people interested in your business at once!
• Customizable messages (you chose what your visitors say — this is not an anonymous mailer that allows to send messages customized by your visitors!)
• Easy to customize form via CSS
• Customizable Success and Error Pages
• No dependencies: you don’t need another plug-in to make iPassion Tell-a-Friend work!

Help/Install Guide

• How-to Install iPassion Tell a Friend Plug-in
  • Step 1: Upload the plug-in file to your wp-content/plugins folder
  • Step 2: Activate the plug-in from WordPress administration Plugins tab
  • Step 3: Create 3 pages as placeholders (for the Tell a Friend form, the Success page and the Error page) in WordPress Page Manager. Name those as you want and place the pages wherever you like. Please note:
    • Tell a Friend form page placeholder content must be [tell a friend form]
    • Success page placeholder content must be [tell a friend success]
    • Error page placeholder content must be [tell a friend error]
  • Step 4: Specify the absolute URL for the Success page and the Error page.
  • Step 5: Customize your message and pages. You can edit page contents from the option page of the Tell a Friend Plug-in (this page). If you do not know HTML forms, please leave the form contents alone: you can add text above the form by filling the form caption field.
• Panic?
  • If the form doesn’t work after you modified it, you can reset the defaults by pressing the reset button.

Version history

• December 2006: First release
• October 2008: Add header action hook updated to priority 1 for improved compatibility with All-in-one-SEO-pack