WordPress updates to 2.6, adds Gears support
Blogging platform WordPress updated to version 2.6 late last night. It's the latest major release since 2.5, which debuted back in late March and adds nearly as many new features as it does bug and security fixes.
The video above outlines some of the major new features. The most useful of the bunch is aimed at bloggers on the go who can now take advantage of the same Google Gears integration introduced to WordPress.com earlier this month. This "turbo" mode downloads some of the files and scripts from your blog to your Gears cache, speeding up the page load when you're on a crummy connection.
Also introduced with the 2.6 update is revisioning, letting you go back to an older version of the blog post and either re-publish it over the newer one, or review the changes. This will be most helpful on multi-author blogs where you'll be able to track changes made by certain members of your blogging team with specific coloring based on author.
Another new feature that is long overdue is a built-in theme previewer, which will let you see a live preview of your blog using a selected theme. Previously you could only see what your existing content and widgets would look like with any theme by applying it over the one currently in use.
As part of the shift in blogging culture, there's also a new "press this" button, which is simply a bookmarklet for posting content from whatever page you're on straight to your WordPress blog. Similar bookmarklets from Facebook, FriendFeed, and Tumblr have proven to be an easy way to take whatever you're looking at and post it, even if the content author does not have a ShareThis, or similar sharing tool integrated into their content pages.
Users of previous versions of WordPress should definitely update to the latest stable release. As many users have discovered (myself included), some of the security holes that continue to be patched with each release can keep your blog from being overrun with spam.
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1) A theme previewer? How many times do they think a serious blogger changes their theme? They make it sound like it's a weekly occurence that needs to have previewing.
2) Versioning of a post also seems like a relatively rare occasion, were talking about blog posts (that are by definition rather short, typically personally-tinged musings of a single author), not 10-100 page documents with multiple authors.
3) The GoogleGears thing is interesting, but hardly something crucial for all but a small minority.
4) Quick capture of other people's content for referencing looks more useful.
5) Some of the media management improvements look useful as well, too bad they had to come as part of the radical redesign since 2.5.x, that actually took away many things that worked just fine or even better than they do now, such as the previous Widgets drag & drop screen, or the right-hand pane of post controls in the write screen (the new write screen wastes even more vertical screen real estate than the old one).
6) None of the security improvements that are mentioned in the post needed to be tied to the radical 2.5.x upgrade, Wordpress/Automattic could have done the right thing and released those separately for older versions as patches. It seems bad practice to use security fears to force users to upgrade, even Microsoft doesn't try to do this quite as often as Wordpress does now.
To get more background on the security fix issues, read my post on an experimental security fix back-porting to 2.3.3 here:
http://businessmindhacks.com/post/wordpress-233-security-retro-fit
1) A theme previewer? How many times do they think a serious blogger changes their theme? They make it sound like it's a weekly occurence that needs to have previewing.
2) Versioning of a post also seems like a relatively rare occasion, were talking about blog posts (that are by definition rather short, typically personally-tinged musings of a single author), not 10-100 page documents with multiple authors.
3) The GoogleGears thing is interesting, but hardly something crucial for all but a small minority.
4) Quick capture of other people's content for referencing looks more useful.
5) Some of the media management improvements look useful as well, too bad they had to come as part of the radical redesign since 2.5.x, that actually took away many things that worked just fine or even better than they do now, such as the previous Widgets drag & drop screen, or the right-hand pane of post controls in the write screen (the new write screen wastes even more vertical screen real estate than the old one).
6) None of the security improvements that are mentioned in the post needed to be tied to the radical 2.5.x upgrade, Wordpress/Automattic could have done the right thing and released those separately for older versions as patches. It seems bad practice to use security fears to force users to upgrade, even Microsoft doesn't try to do this quite as often as Wordpress does now.
To get more background on the security fix issues, read my post on an experimental security fix back-porting to 2.3.3 here:
http://businessmindhacks.com/post/wordpress-233-security-retro-fit
1) A theme previewer? How many times do they think a serious blogger changes their theme? They make it sound like it's a weekly occurence that needs to have previewing.
2) Versioning of a post also seems like a relatively rare occasion, were talking about blog posts (that are by definition rather short, typically personally-tinged musings of a single author), not 10-100 page documents with multiple authors.
3) The GoogleGears thing is interesting, but hardly something crucial for all but a small minority.
4) Quick capture of other people's content for referencing looks more useful.
5) Some of the media management improvements look useful as well, too bad they had to come as part of the radical redesign since 2.5.x, that actually took away many things that worked just fine or even better than they do now, such as the previous Widgets drag & drop screen, or the right-hand pane of post controls in the write screen (the new write screen wastes even more vertical screen real estate than the old one).
6) None of the security improvements that are mentioned in the post needed to be tied to the radical 2.5.x upgrade, Wordpress/Automattic could have done the right thing and released those separately for older versions as patches. It seems bad practice to use security fears to force users to upgrade, even Microsoft doesn't try to do this quite as often as Wordpress does now.
To get more background on the security fix issues, read my post on an experimental security fix back-porting to 2.3.3 here:
http://businessmindhacks.com/post/wordpress-233-security-retro-fit
feel free to delete the multiples