WordPress Update Arrives Early, Packs in New Features
The team behind the popular WordPress publishing system has cranked out the new version 2.6 nearly a month ahead of schedule. The latest version of WordPress features a number of improvements and further refines the new dashboard interface that made its debut in WordPress 2.5, which launched earlier this year.
Perhaps the most welcome of the new features in 2.6 is a full-blown versioning system that makes it dead simple to step backward and forward through all the revisions you’ve made to your post.
If you’re working in a collaborative environment you’ll be able to see who made what changes and when they were saved. There’s even a very slick interface for comparing revisions side-by-side with all the differences highlighted.
WordPress’s “Press This” bookmarklet for making quick posts has also seen a makeover with new features to grab media and quotes from the page you’re linking to.
Other new features include the ability to add captions to your uploaded images and support for the Gears browser plugin for offline storage of media and other files. Obviously there’s a lot more Gears can do for WordPress but at the moment you’ll have to settle for local storage of frequently used CSS and JavaScript files — if nothing else, you should see a speed boost in the admin portion of your site.
WordPress 2.6 also offers live previews of themes, live-updating word counts for your posts, drag-and-drop support for photo galleries (which looks like it uses the same JavaScript tools we outlined yesterday), shift-click support for checkboxes and a good deal more.
You can grab the latest version of WordPress from the official site and keep an eye out for the Easter Egg, which the developers claim isn’t in there. Be sure to let us know if you stumble across it.
For a look at the new WordPress 2.6 features in action, check out this video:
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