Wordpress is a blog publishing system written in PHP. All data is stored in a MySQL database.The latest release of Word Press is version 2.6, released on 15 July 2008. It is distributed under the GNU General Public License.

The purpose of this post is to bring to your notice the key new features in the new release of Wordpress Version 2.6 “Tyner,” named for jazz pianist McCoy Tyner. Let’s look at the feature one-by-one. I have tried to put them in the order of importance. However, there is no hard a fast rule to sort them in that fashion.

1. Post Revision This feature is a life saver and is the most important feature at least for someone like me who usually ends up messing with an on-going post and hence looses out on good lines (both in numbers and content). Re-doing  is so much more painful. What this feature basically does is it auto-saves multiple version of your on-going post and allows you to go back to an older version of the post. The most sexy part is the fact that it shows you in color highlights the changes you have made prior to a revision. Something like the one in the screenshot below.

The left hand side (in pink color) is pre-post revision version and the right hand side (green color) is the revised post. Obviously the one in pink is an earlier copy of the same post. Let me now tell you how to achieve this. When you are writing/editing  a post, right at the bottom you can see something that reads Post Revisions (see the screenshot below)

When you click on any of the saved versions, you’ll get various options. The important ones are marked with a red arrow in the image below.

You can now conveniently compare for changes between any two versions of saved post. You can also restore an older version.

2. Press This

Press This is a simple feature that enables you to quickly post a blog post of the web page you are viewing. On the right hand side (When you are in the Write Post area), you can see something that reads Press This. It’s self explanatory, which reads

Drag-and-drop the following link to your bookmarks bar or right click it and add it to your favorites for a posting shortcut. Press This.

Ones you have bookmarked it (I use the the bookmarklet feature of Firefox/Flock) and you click the link (button in case of bookmarklet), you’ll have the option to quickly post a blog post. It looks something like this. Again the important features are marked with red arrow.

As you can only the basic wordpress features are available. That means if you have some plugin (All-in-one SEO) enabled for wordpress dashboard which enhances the capabilities of your post, it will not be available to you in this mode. As a result I am not a great fan of this feature.

2. Image Caption

I haven’t been able to replicate this (because my image upload is more or less screwed up post upgrade) but to give you some understanding of this, whenever you upload an image and insert it into your post, make sure that you start adding caption to it. Following image from CNN has a caption in it and this is the exact feature that has been replicated in wordpress 2.6.

4. Theme Preview

This is another cool feature. No need of upsetting your readers any more by showing them the theme changes you are planning. If you want to change a theme you can see the preview instantaneously. I am not going to get into the details of this. It’s more or less fun to just try to change your theme and see what happens.

5. Google gears

This (Wordpress 2.6) beautiful piece of open source web application is not complimented by another beautiful open source application called as Gears (earlier Google Gears). Following is what wiki talks about Gears.

Gears, formerly Google Gears, is beta software offered by Google to enable offline access to services that normally only are available online. It installs a database engine, based on SQLite, on the client system to cache the data locally. Gears-enabled pages use data from this local cache rather than from the online service. Using Gears, a web application may periodically synchronize the data in the local cache with the online service. If a network connection is not available, the synchronization is deferred until a network connection is established. Thus Gears enables web applications to work even though access to the network service is not present.

In order to install Google Gears, hit the turbo link on the top right corner of your dashboard once you have logged into the admin area. Google Gear is compatible with Firefox 3, IE 6 and 7 and is all set to be compatible with up coming release of Safari.

6. Word Count

If you search for something like "length of a blog post" on Google, you’ll be hit by a number of people talking about what should be the ideal length of a post. I don’t follow any hard and fast rule on this but if you want to and sound like a pro blogger (who write close to 1000 words in a post) wordpress now shows you the length of the blog post you are writing. It looks something like this:

There are other small little improvements and features which have been added to Wordpress 2.6. I’d suggest you to upgrade to 2.6 just because every new release fixes old bugs and importantly seals any security flaws. Please take a backup of you database before upgrading. I hope this post was useful. Please drop in your comments and have a say on what’s your favorite new feature in Wordpress 2.6.