Tadd Mencer

The folks at WordPress have released the Official 2.6, which is called ‘Tyner’ after some jazz pianist. Which, I hate jazz - but I’ll let them go on their personal opinions.

http://wordpress.org/development/2008/07/wordpress-26-tyner/

Anyway, it was with fear and trembling that I hit "upgrade" on my web site. I secretly upgraded the Studio  646 site first since I get a grand total of no hits so if it crashed, burned and the ashes blew to the four corners of the earth never to be seen again - I don’t think anyone would have noticed.

However, that didn’t happen. It worked perfectly fine and got everything upgraded. It’s looking like 2.6 is a success.

What makes me laugh though is how people are complaining here and there about how WordPress upgrades "way too often", which really comes down to twice a year. And really, they’re just whining because they’re too lazy to upgrade their web sites and make a few adjustments when things don’t work the way they want it to. These are probably also the same people who still run Windows 3.1, use a horse and buggy (which I admit would save gas) and believe that women should only cook, clean and tend to the children.

I digress.

WordPress 2.6 rolls out a few nice features, such as being able to test your template before you go live. I formally did this with a plugin called "Theme Test Drive" which worked well.

Here are some of the smaller features and improvements in 2.6:

• 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.

So yeah, looking good thus far. Praise God for that!