Before you have fully accustomed to WordPress 2.5, The WordPress team is releasing the version 2.6 soon. I took the opportunity to download the WordPress 2.6 Beta 2 and give it a test drive. While there is no change to the design and interface, there are quite a number of improvements and new features that are worth mentioning.
Post Revisioning
It can be a great frustration (or even financial loss) to save a post and find that you accidentally edited/removed some important paragraphs. This is especially true when a blog has multiple authors. This post revisioning feature keeps a log of all your post amendment detail and in any case that you have removed some important stuffs accidentally, you can simply restore the post to an earlier version.
Click to enlarge
Bulk activate/deactivate plugins, plus option to delete
This is a feature that I have been praying for since day 1 of using WordPress. It is a tired chore to activate the plugins one by one, especially when you are using plenty of them. Now you can put a check beside the plugins that you want to activate and click the button to do a bulk activation. In addition, there is also an extra button where you can click to delete the selected plugins.
Using of Google Gear for faster loading
Initially, I thought that the WordPress team is utilizing the Google gear to enable offline editing, but apparently it is not. Instead, it makes use of Google gear to store the WordPress images, scripts and CSS files on your local machine so as to speed up the page loading time. Not too bad, though I prefer an offline posting feature.
Theme previewing
Often you might change a theme only to find that you don’t like it. Now, you can preview your theme before you confirm the changes. (At the time of testing, this feature only works for certain themes. Some themes will just show a white blank preview page).
Remote publishing disabled by default
Due to security reason, the remote publishing by atom publishing protocol and XML-RPC is disabled by default. You have to activate it at Settings->Writing.
New custom avatar
For users without a custom avatar of their own, you can either display a generic logo or a generated one based on their e-mail address.
Word Count
You can now see the number of words in your post after you have saved/publish it.
WordPress 2.6 will be released between 7-14 July 2008. You can download the WordPress 2.6 Beta 2 here.
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I held off on upgrading to WP 2.5 on the basis of your review(s) of it, Damien, and believe that was a wise choice. WordPress 2.6 looks as if it will have been worth waiting for. Thanks much for test-driving it for us!
My Skimmed Milk theme suffers from the blank preview problem mentioned above in the release version of 2.6. Any idea of what the cause might be or even where to start looking? Thanks