WordPress Upgrades to Version 2.6

WordPress.org Home Page

WordPress rolled out their update to version 2.6 the other day with some great new feature improvements. Here’s a quick rundown of the new features.

WordCount

Ever wonder how many words you have in your blog posts? I do. I’ve been a longtime user of the TD Word Count plugin. But now WordPress will tell you how many words are in your post right on the edit screen.

Revision Tracking

Now WordPress will track various revisions of a post. This feature will be especially handy for multi-author blogs. Not to mention those of us who occasionally delete big chunks of a post by mistake. Now we can restore an earlier save of the post and not loose all that work!

Photo Captions

This is a wonderful little feature. Now WordPress has the built in ability to add captions to your post images automatically like you see under the screen shot to the right. You might have to adjust your style sheet to display them the way you like though.

Press This

They’ve added a shortcut that you can drag to the toolbar of most web browsers so you can blog about things you see on the on the web with just one click. Click the “Press This” shortcut and a new browser window will open up with all sorts of goodies to make posting to your blog faster and easier.

WYSIWYG Image Control

They’ve integrated several of the most common image control features right into the WYSIWYG editor. That means you can have more control over how your images display without having to know all that HTML coding stuff.

Improved Gravatar Support

Now you can select from a variety of default avatars to display for folks without a Gravatar account. I went into my theme and manually changed my setting from the old WordPress default to the Gravatar logo. With version 2.6 you can make that change right from your WordPress dashboard.

And Much More

There’s a ton of other things included in this update from being able to select multiple check boxes via shift-click to a bubble to let you know when you have plugins that are out of date. They also fixed nearly 200 bugs with this release along with numerous security enhancements.

And Early Too!

Not only did they make all these improvements but they got version 2.6 ready for release nearly a month ahead of schedule! Great job for the WordPress development team.

If you’d like to check out what some of those changes look like here’s a short video they prepared to show you. Check it out.

UPDATE: For some reason I can’t seem to get the video embed to play from here. If you want to check out the video head on over to the Upgrade Announcement over on the WordPress development blog.