Wordpress 2.6

The Wordpress developers have released version 2.6 of their blogging plattform almost one month ahead of schedule and while some users might be excited to update their blogs and test the new features I’m always a bit taken back by those updates because it means that I have to spend a few hours updating my blogs to the newest version.

Wordpress 2.6 introduces quite a few new features and some of them do sound interesting. They introduce revisions in this new Wordpress version which gives the user the option to restore and compare previous revisions of a text. Gears is another interesting feature that might especially appeal to users with slower connections. For now Gears is being used to store data in a local cache on the users’ computer to speed up the Wordpress blog.

The most appealing change for me is without doubt the new plugin interface which finally divides active and inactive plugins, something that I wanted for years.

There have been many minor changes as well. A bookmarklet called Post It that can be used to embed objects, like text, videos or images, from a website directly into a Wordpress post that opens in a new window, a word count, the ability to force SSL, shift-click selection of checkboxes, editor updates and customizable default avatars.

I’ll be busy the next few hours updating my blogs and websites with this new version. The developers claim that there should not be any troubles updating to that version. We will see how it goes.