The “Break it Down” Blog

Publishers rejoice, WordPress 2.6 has been released and while I initially anticipated it to be a bug-fix release to follow 2.5.1, it looks like the WordPress team has snuck in quite a few sexy features. We’ll take a look at each below piece-by-piece which are reviewed in the WordPress 2.6 feature movie here.

Outline

• Gears - Turbo Charged Caching
• Post Revisions, Comparisons and Restore
• Press This
• Image Captions
• Drag and Drop Image Management and Ordering
• Live Theme Preview
• Enhanced Avatar Support
• Enhanced Plugin Management
• Word Count
• Conclusion

Gears - Turbo Charged Caching

Gears is a new feature in 2.6 that once installed, will allow you to cache all resources from the interface locally in your Firefox 2, Firefox 3, Internet Explorer 6, Internet Explorer 7 and soon Safari 3 cache including images, JavaScript and CSS files to make working with the admin interface snappy and not waiting for load times if you are doing a lot of admin work.

This seemed like a really forward-thinking feature to add to WordPress and I thank the team for doing it. Not everyone is hosting their WordPress-based site on a super-server so load times for these really complex admin pages can be daunting and sluggish at times, especially if you are an impatient person or have a lot to write/edit/etc. Really kick ass feature, thank you guys!

Post Revisions, Comparisons and Restore

WordPress 2.6 now brings to the table complete revision history and management for posts including comparison and restore support. Handy for posts that a lot of edits are done to, collaborative work with another author or maybe you screwed something up royally and your browser crashed and you need to restore the posts to it’s previous state.

Post revisions is a great addition to the already rediculously powerful WordPress publishing feature set.

Press This

This is an interesting new feature that starts off in the form of an integrated bookmarklet that you can hit on any page or story that you want to blog, then the story, it’s graphical resources, summaries, etc. are loaded up in a WordPress mini-post interface where you can chop up the story and write it however you want pulling Images and Videos from the original post as you want to create your post.

If you blog by scouring news from other sites and covering those topics that are interesting to your readers (a lot like this site), this is going to be a godsend feature for you.

Image Captions

If you do a lot with images on your site you are going to love the addition of image captions. No longer do you have to try and wing captions with small 2-row tables, they are directly support in the image gallery/image editing interface and inserted with a consistent look and feel to them directly into your post.

Drag and Drop Image Management and Ordering

Subtle but awesome, again for publishers that make use of a lot of images. When you do mass-uploads of images that were added in 2.5, you’ll notice that they upload in alphabetical order, which is then carried across to any inserted galleries you have in your post. You may want the images in a different order that isn’t necessarily alphabetical and now in 2.6 you can simply drag and drop the images around into modified orders on the Gallery screen for the Image Management interface to set that ordering.

Live Theme Preview

This has been a highly requested feature for a while especially for publishers that are always trying to tweak their site and make it look a bit better: the ability to preview a new theme live, on your site, without applying it to the production site incase something is wrong with it.

There have been plugins to do this in the past, but now WordPress 2.6 supports it directly.

Enhanced Avatar Support

Besides the existing Gravatar support WordPress 2.6 has further enhanced avatar support for users directly into the profile settings; allowing users to have a bit more control over refining their representation on your site.

Enhanced Plugin Management

WordPress 2.6 also brings enhanced plugin management allowing you to quickly activate and deactivate multiple plugins at once instead of walking your way through an entire list, hitting a button and waiting for a page refresh.

This is important for authors working with a lot of different plugins, site designs or WordPress upgrades when you may need to troubleshoot certain plugin conflict issues.

Word Count

Minor but still nice: word count. For publishers that are working with a team or your editor needs to keep you in-bounds of a certain word count number, this can be very handy. For other authors that have personal limits set on themselves for how long they want their posts or how short, again a very handy tool to keep an eye on how your writing is doing.

Conclusion

Overall WordPress 2.6 looks like an awesome update to the 2.5 series, bringing a lot of new features to the table to help increase productivity with the publishing platform.

If you are already a WordPress users, you are probably psyched about the Gears and “Press This” features, and if you are a blogger and haven’t used WordPress before, you should really take a look; it’s awesome.

Download it here!