Yesterday,WordPress 2.6(code named “Tyner”) was officially released.Here is an extensive review and guide to the new wordpress 2.6

Upgradation

One can upgrade via the old manual method or by using auto update wordpress plugins.I feel that using auto update wordpress plugins is the easiest way of doing the upgradation.There are several such plugins available,i used WordPress Automatic upgrade plugin and it performed the upgradation without any difficulties

Here are some of new features in the latest WordPress 2.6 which i love :

Plugin management

Multiple selection of plugins in new Wp 2.3 makes it possible to activate or deactivate more than one plugins easily.Note that in case of multiple selection, one needs to click the Activate,Deactivate or Delete button which is at the top of that particular column

There is also a block in the plugins page which displays the recently deactivated plugins

Caption

WordPress 2.6 now offers the ability to display the caption below the image.

If u don’t like the WYSIWYG facility,u can also append caption by using new caption id tag
For example:

Caption in Images

Word Count

Will update itself with the number of words often so that one can see how many word count of the post(The number will not be updated in real time though)

Post Revisions

Taking a hint from Wikipedia,the new WordPress 2.6 tracks all changes made to the post along with the details of the changes.The revision history can be seen in the bottom of the Write Page.Clicking on any one of the link will display the exact content in the post
at that moment.

One can restore or revert back to any state.The most amazing thing is the compare feature used to compare the changes between 2 revisions.

Gears Support

Gears is an open source project that enables more powerful web applications, by adding new features to your web browser.By using gears support,a “Local Server” is created which caches 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.This feature is designed to speed the blogging process.
To enable Gear,click the Turbo link which is at the right top.

Note that gears is supported currently in Firefox and IE only.
I activated Gears and i didn’t experienced any major change in speed.

Theme Preview Before Activation

In wordpress 2.5, before activation of theme a pop up window appears which shows the theme live with all your content.So,one can see how the site will look before activation of the theme.

Earlier this task was performed with the help of plugins but from now on,there is no need of such plugins.

Press This!

It is nothing but a new posting bookmarklet in wordpress.To use this just drag the Press This link which is in the Write Page to ur browser bookmarks or toolbar

Now whenever u find an interesting webpage and u wish to blog about that,just click bookmarklet u just created and a new pop up window will appear via which u can select either Text,Photo,Video,Quote from the webpage and blog about it

If any selection of text is made in the webpage and then the Press This bookmarklet is clicked,then the selected text will appear in the popup window.

Apart from these,there are still many more features available in the WordPress 2.6.Refer the Release notes for more information

Here is a nice video made by wordpress development theme which explains the new features

[Download WordPress 2.6]

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