Yesterday, Matt officially announced the release of WordPress 2.6 codenamed “Tyner” to the blogging community. WordPress release codename’s are named after jazz musicians and continuing with the tradition, 2.6 has been named after McCoy Tyner. It contains many new features that makes WordPress a more powerful  CMS (Content Management System).

One of the most important features of this release is Version Control System which enables Wiki-like tracking of edits similar to Wikipedia. This would be a very handy feature which enables the users to just undo and go back to a previous version of the post.

Another major feature introduced in this version is display of captions alongside the images. The example can be seen in the WordPress logo displayed in top of this post.  [Looks like alignment of captions has an issue. I am not just able to get it aligned]

Theme previews would be loved by any serious WordPress user. It was a long awaited feature. It enables to preview the theme, tweak and correct your mistakes before the whole world sees it.

WordPress uses Gears (previously known as Google Gears), an open source browser extension project started by Google. It is primarily for developers to manage offline storage thus enabling you to get a little extra juice. It maintains a cache or keeps a copy of commonly-used Javascript and CSS files on your computer, which can speed up the loading of some pages by several seconds (they just pop right up!). You can install Gears for Firefox or Internet Explorer, with support for Safari and Opera pending. WP 2.6 only uses the cache concept and the future versions are promised with more features in collaboration with Gears.

Other notable features in this release of WordPress are

• Word Count are displayed in the side bar when writing or editing the posts.
• You can reorder the gallery just by drag and drop.
• Bulk management of plugins. Just enable or disable all plugins in a single click.
• “Press This” bookmarklet which enables you to blog from anywhere just by clicking a boomarklet in your browser.
• More advanced image control enabling easy insertion, resizing.  Also shifting from Flash uploader to the classic uploader is easy.
• Full SSL support in the core, and the ability to force SSL for security.
• A number of proactive security enhancements, including cookies and database interactions. Version 2.6 fixes approximately 194 bugs.
• Stronger better faster versions of TinyMCE, jQuery, and jQuery UI.

With all these new features, I decided to jump the bandwagon without having to wait for my Hosting company to update the Fantastico which will help me automatically upgrade my WordPress installation. Now bit Feed is powered by WordPress 2.6

Related articles

• Wordpress 2.6 is out. Should you upgrade. Yes!
• Wordpress 2.6 adds revisions, Gears and Tumblr style blogging
• ‘Press It’ Bookmarklet in WordPress 2.6 Makes Tumblelogging Easy
• WordPress 2.6 Released Early
• Happy birthday, Google Gears!