Gotta love the developers of WordPress- they release the new version early, put a post up on their developer blog- with a 3.5 minute video to showcase the changes- but their posted video doesn’t play in Firefox 3 on a mac!

I’ll embed it here too, where it works (above). Here is the list of new features:

WordPress › Blog » WordPress 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.

2.6 also brings the return of PressIt as PressThis… We’ll have to see what that means for our favorite feature.
Wiki style editing and revision tracking. Google Gears implementation- very basic at this point. And- finally a theme previewer so you can see what a mess you’ve made of your theme before everyone else has to- at least in your browser.
We’ll be testing 2.6 real soon- and hopefully, it won’t break too many sites.

First observations:

• On the plugins page it seperates inactive and active plugins, and it gives you a little orange alert symbol that tells you how many plugins need to be upgraded from all pages.
• The templates page is cleaned up with more info on each template, and only listing a certain number of templates on each page (click the next page to see the rest).
• The fields that can be filled out to add information, like when adding a new link, allow clicking on the titles of the fields to put the cursor in the text box. Not any easier, but certainly allows for accesibility.
• Widget editor does not jump around like it used to when moving the order of widgets.
• In the Post and Page editor, there is a seperation from the normal parameters and the newly titled Advanced Options…which were there before but now are more distinctly labelled.
• It seems faster and cleaner for navigation.