WordPress 2.6 Released, Update your wp-blog

July 15, 2008 by SunJie

The release of WordPress 2.6 is now official. In addition to the features I highlighted previously, Ryan has details on his blog about the improved support for SSL, and some new helper functions which will be useful for plugin and theme authors. And the official dev blog post has details on other new features. One of the more interesting things that I didn’t yet know about was that the Press This bookmarklet has some nifty autodetection which will make it easy to automatically embed content from sites like YouTube and Flickr.

Here are some of the smaller features and improvements in 2.6:

Word count! Never guess how many words are in your post anymore.
Image captions, so you can add sweet captions like Political Ticker does under your images.
Bulk management of plugins.
A completely revamped image control to allow for easier inserting, floating, and resizing. It’s now fully integrated with the WYSIWYG.
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, but you can turn it on easily through the options screen.
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.