Wordpress 2.6 Review

Wordpress 2.6 “Tyner” was released yesterday and has some nice improvements over 2.5 and 2.5.1 making the new interface much easier to use and adding some great features to make blogging much easier. Today, I installed 2.6 on my localhost to check it out and I was pleased with the new features. 2.5 had quite a few bugs that were pretty annoying but most of these were ironed out in 2.5.1, 2.6 however just seems much more stable like a chair built with wood and nails as opposed to wood and tape. Oh, and if you are wondering why it is called Tyner, it was named after jazz pianist McCoy Tyner.

Continues below...

Features include post revisions which enable you to see past versions of posts and even restore back to these if you wish, this is starting to become a common occurance in many areas of software so it is nice to see it implemented into Wordpress.

Also the Press This feature has been improved, simply add the link to your bookmarks and when you find a webpage you would like to blog about simple choose the bookmark and a window appears enabling you to grab text, images, quotes and videos and post them to your blog.

A simple but effective feature is the option to add Image Captions, this may not seem a big deal but it really is, it enables you to well, caption your images so it is great if you need to leave credit to the owner of the image.

Theme Previewing has been added to 2.6 enabling you to see how a theme will look before commiting it to your blog, this will mean that you can check whether everything works correctly without affecting your users who are currently viewing the blog.

You can also now speed up blogging by using Gears which will add scripts, images and other content to your hard drive so your personal blogging is speeded up.

There are also plenty of other little features including, Word Count when you are posting, Gallery Sorting so that when you use the gallery option you can arrange the image order, Avatar enhanced support and the option to select multiple items from lists using Shift and Click.

Overall, I am pleased with the developments of Wordpress 2.6 and will be upgrading my sites to it in the near future. Wordpress amazes me everytime a new release is unleashed on the world and really does prove its right to stand as the leader in blogging software. Below is the official video from Wordpress about the new release so check it out to see the features I mentioned in action.

958 views