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WordPress 2.6 has been released today, nearly a month early. Not bad. I’ve never seen such support for a free platform before. Have a few minutes to spare? Let the developers walk you through the latest update with the following video.

Major Updates

1. Tracked changes. You can now view edits to current posts in a Wiki-style format. Gone are the old methods of saving and potentially losing lost content. You can track all changes from all authors.
2. Press This! You can now add a bookmark to your toolbar for each blog that when clicked, will launch a ‘Quick Post’ feature that will allow you to quickly update or save ideas for updates.
3. Theme Preview. This allows you to test out new themes before making them public. It’s extremely useful when developing new themes or making alterations that could potentially bring your site down.

Minor Updates

• 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.

Click here to download WordPress 2.6.
Click here for help upgrading.

Featured, Weekly Updates »

Top 3 New WordPress Themes of the Week

1. Typography – (Live Demo) – This two-column theme is sleek and clean, focused on typography. However, I do like my themes with a bit more color.
2. Hamasaki – (Live Demo) – This theme is a bit more conventional and professional. It has enough ad space for any aspiring blogger..
3. Personal Mag Theme – (Live Demo) – A more minimal theme focused on content rather than design. There is no set ad space. This means you’ll need to alter code on your own to incorporate ads into the design.

Looking for more themes? Be sure to check out 15 Free Fresh WordPress Themes.

Top 3 New WordPress Plugins of the Week

1. Email Commenters is a quick simple plugin that will allow you to get in contact with all of those who have a comment on a certain post.
2. Enhanced Recent Posts expands on WordPress built-in recent posts function. You can choose a number of options that gives you more control over the most recent posts displayed.
3. Tippy allows you to create pop-up custom tips when a user hovers over select links in your post. Useful for expanding an article without taking up more space.

Featured Blogs this Week

1. A Question of Perspective – From owner Elisa: A mishmash of things with a common goal: to get my brain fluid enough to finish the book I started. And to collect folks’ Google Chat Status updates.

Have a new theme, plugin, or blog you’re working on? Contact me to have it featured for free.