The latest version of WordPress, WordPress 2.6 has been released for free download. WordPress version 2.6 is nicknamed “Tyner” after the name of jazz pianist McCoy Tyner. Name aside, WordPress 2.6 has lots of features enhancements and improvements that make WordPress more perfect and a more powerful CMS.

WordPress blog lists out the new features of WordPress 2.6, top of the list is of course ability to track changes to every pages and posts, and Google Gears integration.

  1. Post Revisions: Wiki-like tracking of edits.
  2. Differences between two versions of posts.
  3. Press This!: Post from wherever you are on the web.
  4. Shift Gears: Turbo-speed your blogging.
  5. Theme Previews: See it before your audience does.
  6. Word count! Never guess how many words are in your post anymore.
  7. Image captions, so you can add sweet captions like Political Ticker does under your images.
  8. Bulk management of plugins.
  9. A completely revamped image control to allow for easier inserting, floating, and resizing. It’s now fully integrated with the WYSIWYG.
  10. Drag-and-drop reordering of Galleries.
  11. Plugin update notification bubble.
  12. Customizable default avatars.
  13. You can now upload media when in full-screen mode.
  14. Remote publishing via XML-RPC and APP is now secure (off) by default, but you can turn it on easily through the options screen.
  15. Full SSL support in the core, and the ability to force SSL for security.
  16. You can now have many thousands of pages or categories with no interface issues.
  17. Ability to move your wp-config file and wp-content directories to a custom location, for “clean” SVN checkouts.
  18. Select a range of checkboxes with “shift-click.”
  19. You can toggle between the Flash uploader and the classic one.
  20. A number of proactive security enhancements, including cookies and database interactions.
  21. Stronger better faster versions of TinyMCE, jQuery, and jQuery UI.
  22. Version 2.6 fixes approximately 194 bugs.

Can’t really understand what’s the new features are about? View the following video demo about WordPress 2.6.

As usual, installing WordPress or upgrading WordPress is just simple few steps. And as version 2.6 is pretty much identical to 2.5 from a plugin and theme compatibility point of view, so there should be no incompatibility issue related to plugins and themes used.

Download WordPress 2.6 (zip).

Update: WordPress 3.0